2. Propiedades electromagn´ eticas del neutrino
2.3. Cotas experimentales
3.5.1 Site
The site chosen for this study was an English language teaching institute at an Australian university. Students at this centre are all full fee paying adult learners, aged 18 and over, who come from various countries, such as Japan, China, Saudi Arabia, Libya, India and many others. They are all full-time students, receiving 20 hours of face-to-face teaching per week in a class of students of a similar level. In this institute, maximum class size is 18; in fact the average number per class should not exceed 16, as laid out by the accrediting body, the National English Language Teaching Accreditation Scheme (NEAS). The majority of students study English to improve their language skills in order to enter an English speaking university. For this reason, grammar is of vital importance to them, as they will be expected to produce written assignments and to participate in tutorials. This means that they will be required to write and to speak in as fluent and grammatically correct English as possible, so that they can be easily understood by both lecturers and fellow students.
3.5.2 Participants
3.5.2.1 Phase 1 – Inventories
All teachers (total of 28) at the chosen centre were invited to participate, as all could benefit from the resulting professional development program. Obviously, some teachers had more grammar knowledge and more confidence than other teachers, even before the study began. As previously mentioned, teachers at the centre chosen for the study could number from ten to 35, since teacher numbers fluctuate according to numbers of students in any given five-week module. The teachers employed at this centre range from young graduates to those who have been teaching for over 30 years. The ratio of females to males is roughly 6:1. All teachers at this centre have first degrees in various disciplines, ranging from education to dentistry. Furthermore, teachers must also hold a qualification to enable them to be specialist English teachers: some teachers have a Master’s
degree in linguistics, but the majority have entered the profession through
completion of a CELTA course. The CELTA is a four-week course (120 hours) which provides a very practical pre-service qualification for aspiring English language teachers. However, it is not a four-week crash course in English grammar. Among the group of teachers, nine have ongoing status, and they are 60% or 100% full time equivalent. The remainder are termed “casual”, but a better appellation might be “sessional”. In the first phase of the study, 26 teachers volunteered to participate in keeping inventories. This number represented virtually all of the teaching staff, which at that time totalled 28.
3.5.2.2 Phase 2 – Written survey
In Phase 2, the number of participants was 21. The reason for the decrease in numbers was that by the time Phase 2 was conducted, the number of students had decreased. Student numbers tend to vary from one five-week module to the next. Coupled with this situation, the number of teachers had also commensurately declined. Five of the original volunteers were not at the centre when Phase 2 was implemented.
3.5.2.3 Phase 3 – Interviews
In Phase 3, four interviews were held. The backgrounds of the four interviewees are given below:
Respondent 8 was male. In the past he had worked as a bus driver and tour guide. As such, he had previously worked with people of many nationalities, and this drew him to teaching English to international students. When he was tour guiding, he found he could communicate with his clients very well, so it seemed to him to be a logical progression to move into teaching English. He had had very little education, but used to love travelling which led to jobs as a tour bus driver in Europe. He often made quizzes for his tour groups, and he found himself teaching English informally in those situations. He came into English teaching by completing a CELTA course in 2002. This was followed by a Bachelor of Adult and Vocational Education degree (BAVE) in 2006 and a Master of Education (M.Ed.) in 2010. He began teaching
English after obtaining the CELTA qualification and before completing the BAVE qualification.
Respondent 10 was female. She came to English teaching after working in office administration. A visit to Japan led her to develop an interest in teaching English to international students. She completed a Bachelor of Arts degree (B.A.) in 1997 and a CELTA in 2005. The CELTA enabled her to enter the profession of teaching English to international students at tertiary level.
Respondent 17 was female. She had been an English language teacher for over 20 years. Her first qualification was a Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) and she completed a Graduate Diploma in Applied Linguistics in 1989. Her career in teaching English to international students has spanned more than 20 years and her experience has been Australia-wide.
Respondent 23 was female. Her original qualifications included a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) and a Diploma of Education (Dip.Ed.). She had been a long-term teacher of high school mathematics and science. She completed a CELTA in 2009 and entered the English teaching profession at tertiary level shortly after that time. In addition, at the time of interview, she was studying for a Master’s degree in Linguistics. This teacher, although not very young, was very new to the area of English language teaching.
3.5.3 Sampling
When information about the study was advertised and teachers were invited to participate, 26 out of a possible 28 teachers volunteered for the study. Many of them articulated their realisation that this study was very much needed, and that they were very eager to participate in it. Therefore, the sampling for Phase 1 was 93% of the total number of teachers at the time the study took place. For Phase 2, 21 of the original 26 completed the survey.
It could be said that both of these phases employed convenience sampling, which has been termed by Babbie (2008) as “easy, but not representative” (p. 212).
However, because the number of respondents to Phase 1 was 26 out of a possible 28, it is almost a complete enumeration. In this action research case study, only the teachers at the centre where the study took place could have been considered as respondents, and the number who volunteered was a very high percentage. Therefore, the “non-representativeness” aspect of convenience sampling can be said to be not applicable in this instance.
For Phase 3, four participants were invited to take part in the interviews. Invitation to take part is known as purposive sampling, which, according to Babbie (2008), is the selection of participants based on the researcher’s judgement of “which ones will be the most useful” (p. 527).