The study was conducted in accordance with the ethics requirements of Oxford Brookes University.
4.9.1 The ethical warrant for the study
The study sought to address an area of uncertainty about the interventions under investigation, demonstrated by the systematic review presented in Chapter 3. In situations of uncertainty about competing hypotheses, but where practitioners must still make related decisions about practice, the most ethical response is to test the competing hypotheses (Ashcroft 2000). The alternative is to allow policy decisions to be taken on the basis of dogma. When educational decisions are made on the basis of dogma rather than evidence, the potential negative consequences range from wasted time, resources and opportunities at best, to, at worst, active harm to students’ development. Given that we do not have sufficient evidence to guide teachers’ policy decisions about the use of L1 in L2 schools, and therefore teachers have no option but to take related policy decisions based on dogma, the ethical warrant for the study was met.
4.9.2 Informed consent
After headteachers had agreed to participate. Participant information sheets for parents (Appendix C) were sent home with all eligible children in each school. Participant information sheets described the study, and outlined what participation involved, including a statement about their rights while involved in the study. A consent form was appended to this information sheet (Appendix E). In the meetings held at each school for interested parents and their children, I described in more detail what involvement in the study involved and explained the measures I would take to ensure participants were treated in accordance with Oxford Brookes University’s ethics guidelines. Parents and children were given the opportunity to ask questions about the project. I also gave them my
email address and the email addresses of the University’s Ethics Officer and my supervisors, to allow them to follow up in private if they wished. At these meetings, I also distributed a simplified
participant information sheet for students (Appendix D). The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) ethics guidance states that children should have opportunities “to access support in their decision-making, for example by discussing their choice with a trusted adult” (ESRC 2015:29). Therefore, parents of eligible participants were encouraged to talk about the project with their children, and to take their child’s wishes into account when deciding whether or not to consent to their participation. Parents of eligible pupils who did not attend the meetings were sent copies of all of this information. All direct written communication with parents was conducted by the school. At no point did I have information about the families’ residential addresses, phone numbers or email addresses.
As participants were all legal minors, participation relied on their parents consenting to their participation. This was obtained for all children who participated in the study.
4.9.3 Risk management and data protection
The study was conducted in a climate of mistrust between the Department of Education (DfE) and minority ethnic communities. At the beginning of the school year 2016/17 (the year in which my study was conducted) the DfE introduced a requirement on schools to report the place of birth and the nationalities of their students. This had been criticised (e.g. by pressure group
DefendDigitalMe.com) as contributing to the creation of an hostile environment for minority ethnic children and their families. Indeed, the policy was roundly criticised in a Motion to Regret in the House of Lords shortly after it was introduced. It was characterised by Lord Storey, who brought the motion, as having “all the hallmarks of racism” and contributing to feelings “of victimisation and being targeted” among members of different ethnic groups (Storey 2016). Despite assurances from the Minister of State for Schools that these data would “be collected solely for internal
Departmental use for […] analytical, statistical and research purposes” and that there were “no plans to share the data with other government Departments” (Gibb 2016), there is evidence that personal information about minority ethnic children was being passed on to the Home Office by the DfE as a matter of routine (Gayle 2016).
In this climate, parents may have been understandably reluctant to be involved in anything that might draw attention to their family’s cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and that collected data about their ethnicity, language, and the amount of time they had spent in the English school system. In addition to normal privacy arrangements for studies of this kind, it was extremely important to reassure parents that data collected about them and their children would not be used for any
purpose other than for this study, and to take every reasonable step to ensure that individual children and their families could not be identified from my data, and that data would not be shared with any other organisation (within the limits of legality). It was, therefore, made clear to parents what those steps would be. Each child was assigned a unique identifying number in place of their names, schools were referred to using pseudonyms, data were stored in a password protected laptop computer, backups of those data were stored in a secure online repository, raw data were made available only to the author and supervisors, and, in reporting those data, individual participants could not be directly identified. I also committed to referring any instances of racism or
discriminatory behaviour, should I witness it while conducting the study, to the headteachers or heads of pastoral care at the schools, so that they could be considered in relation to the school’s anti-discrimination and safeguarding policies. In the event that any participant, their parents, or school wished to discontinue involvement in the study, in line with ethics guidance at Oxford Brookes University, I made clear that they had that right at any point up until the data had been analysed.
4.9.4 Reporting findings to participants
In the field of health research, the moral obligation on researchers to offer participants a summary of the results of the research that communicates clearly and completely what the results say and what they mean, has long been an expectation on researchers (Schulte 1991, Fernadez, Kodish and Weijer 2003, Evans et al. 2011). The educational research establishment in the UK has been slower to realise their ethical responsibility in these terms, with the British Educational Research
Association (BERA) stating in their most recent ethics guidelines merely that “researchers have a responsibility to consider […] whether and how to engage with participants at the conclusion of the research” (BERA 2018:8, emphasis added). Having considered this, I committed to making available on conclusion of the study a plain language summary of the results, and my interpretation of the meaning of those results, to any participant who wished to have one. The ethics application was approved by Oxford Brookes University.
CHAPTER 5
RESULTS
5.1 Introduction
This chapter is organised into three sections. First, RQ1 is addressed through analysis of the effects of the L1 and English-only interventions on each outcome measure (expressive and receptive
knowledge of the target words). This is presented as differences in post-test scores by condition, and as the extent of change between pre- and post-test scores in each condition. Next, to address RQ2, associations between participant characteristics and outcomes in each condition are explored through the calculation of bivariate correlations. Based on the findings of that analysis, data are explored to assess whether any significant correlations among sub groups in the sample and
outcomes in each condition are differentially associated with the intervention conditions. Finally, the overall findings of the intervention study are summarised.