Cultivos de levaduras en hipoxia

The present study was granted ethical approval from Lancaster University. The consent form and the information sheet that were handed to the participants met the terms

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and standards of the accepted ethical practices of Lancaster University. The consent agreement form was written in English. A copy of the consent form can be found in Appendix A.

Before conducting the study, approval for its administration was granted by the Dean at Princess Norah bint Abdulrahman University (PNU). In order to gain permission, the researcher provided a formal letter from Lancaster University confirming that the process of data collection was an essential part of the researcher’s doctoral project. This permission allowed the researcher to conduct the study, which took three months, starting in October and ending in December 2015. After the permission from the Dean of PNU was granted, an email was sent to the head of the preparatory year programme and the head of the Faculty of Languages and Translation, informing them about the nature of the study and the number of participants that was required for the study. The researcher was also granted approval to conduct the study with intermediate proficiency users in the preparatory year and with the advanced learners in the Faculty of Languages and Translation. These approvals met the terms and conditions of the accepted ethical standards of PNU.

The English Department in the preparatory year deanship cooperated with the researcher to allocate a suitable venue for the study. The department also provided the researcher with the Oxford Placement Test (OPT) results of the intermediate proficiency users who participated in this study. Furthermore, the Faculty of Languages and Translation cooperated with the researcher by allocating a suitable venue for the study and sending an email to its teaching staff informing them about the nature of the study and encouraging participation.

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3.5.4 Participants

The participants in this study were recruited from Princess Norah bint Abdulrahman University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The participants who agreed to participate were asked to write down the date and time that was convenient for them to do the test.

A total of ninety-nine female4 participants were included in the final sample of the present study. They were able to complete both the off-line task and the on-line task. Ten additional participants took part in the present study, but were excluded from the study because they were unable to complete the two tasks. The sample consisted of N=35 L2 participants who were of intermediate proficiency level in English, and N=33 L2 advanced proficiency users of English. In addition, N=31 native speakers of English provided a native speaker baseline. All participants were right-handed and had normal vision. The L2 users were all Saudi nationals and the native speakers of English were British nationals.

The first language for the two groups of L2 users was Arabic. The majority of L2 users spoke the Najdi dialect, an informal Arabic dialect spoken in the central region of Saudi Arabia. Like many informal Arabic dialects, this dialect is a non-standard variety of Arabic and therefore it lacks standard formal grammar. The dialect is used in informal communicative settings and it is never used in formal oral or written communicative settings. However, in most formal settings, especially in education, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is used.

The recruiting of the participants followed the convenience sampling method, which bases its selection of participants on their availability to participate (Mackey & Gass, 2005). This type of sampling is widely used in SLA studies. Cohen, Manion and Morrison (2007) mentioned that this volunteer sampling is sometimes inevitable, as in some cases

4 _{The sample in this study is restricted to female L2 users due to some social and cultural norms in Saudi}

Arabia, which may restrict access to male campuses. In Saudi Arabia, male and female campuses function separately and independently in almost all academic settings.

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researchers are faced with difficulties with access. In the present study, due to the limitation of time and the demanding nature of the tasks – the study requires the participants to perform an on-line task and complete two questionnaires – it was not possible to select the participants by following any different sampling method. The selection of participants in the native speakers group was also based on their availability and willingness to perform the two tasks. A detailed description of the characteristics of the participants in the three groups is provided below.

3.5.4.1 Intermediate L2 users

The intermediate L2 users (n=35) were students enrolled in an undergraduate programme (preparatory year programme) in Princess Norah bint Abdulrahman University in Saudi Arabia. This programme is offered by the university for all undergraduate students prior to their enrolment in one of the university's faculties. Before the start of the programme, students had to take a language proficiency test to assess their proficiency level in English. The university administered an on-line Oxford Placement Test (OPT) (Allan, 1992). This test is a standardised language proficiency test that is designed to sort learners into nine proficiency bands based on their performance on the test. On the day of the test, the students were advised to attend a PowerPoint presentation in an auditorium to familiarise themselves with the nature and purpose of the proficiency test before heading to the computer labs to do the test.

The maximum number of students in each computer lab was thirty. In this test, the students’ performance was automatically recorded and marked. After the results had been revealed, the students were grouped in to classes according to their level of proficiency in English. Usually there were 20-25 students in one class. One of the advantages of this process was that it enabled the university to provide students with the appropriate syllabus and language courses, which can help them improve their English language proficiency.

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According to the Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFR), L2 users’ language proficiency is divided into six reference levels (see Appendix H) and each level is described based on what a learner is expected to perform in listening, reading, writing and speaking tests. Based on the results of the online Oxford Placement Test, students are assigned to one of the six reference levels, level six (C2) being the highest level. However, no students were assigned to level six in 2015, the year the study was conducted. In the present study, the intermediate proficiency learners were placed on level four. This level corresponds to the B1 level of the CEFR. Accordingly, the intermediate proficiency learners in this study are able to understand complex texts and can interact with a degree of fluency. This level was selected because it seemed unclear whether students with lower levels of proficiency would be able to understand the constructions under investigation. It was questionable whether the data selected from these students would have been informative enough for the purposes of the study, particularly since the aim of the present study is to investigate constructions that are infrequently used.

The researcher contacted the English language coordinator in order to agree on an appropriate time to visit the students in class. The researcher visited the class to meet the participants, briefly explained the nature of the test and told the participants that their participation was voluntary. The students were assured that their participation was in no way related to their academic studies and would not affect their academic progress. The students were then given the information sheet and were encouraged to ask questions if they had any. A convenient time for the test was agreed with those who wished to participate.

The age of the participants in this group was between 18 to 20 years of age (M= 18. 20, SD: 1.20). None of the participants had lived in an English-speaking country and none of them had knowledge of another language a part from English and Arabic. The

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participants had received nine years of formal schooling on English as a foreign language. All of the participants had received formal explicit instruction on English grammar in classroom settings, and the domain language for the English instruction was mainly English and partly Arabic (i.e. the instructions are introduced first in English and sometimes Arabic was used for clarification).

3.5.4.2 Advanced L2 users

The study included 33 advanced learners. They were all teaching staff working as teaching assistants and lecturers at the department of English in the Faculty of Languages and Translation in Princess Norah bint Abdulrahman University. The age of the participants in this group ranged between 22 and 30 years old (M= 26.31, SD= 2.24). They had Bachelor and Master’s degrees in linguistics and English-related subjects. The participants have had experience of teaching English at university level, and this experience ranged from 2 to 5 years. They had all taken the IELTS5 and achieved scores of 7 to 8, with an overall mean of 7.2 (SD = 1.30) out of a possible 9 (i.e. C1 and C2 levels of the CEFR). The period since they had taken the IELTS test ranged from 13 months to 4 months. These participants were preparing to a apply for postgraduate programmes in the UK at the time of this study, and for this reason they had taken the IELTS test as it was one of the requirements of enrolling in these programmes. The sample was selected based on the results of this proficiency test since there were no advanced proficiency level students enrolled in the preparatory year programme, and for practical reasons I had to conduct the experiments (both the off-line and on-line tasks) with the three groups within a limited time of a visit to Saudi Arabia. Moreover, this group had good experience of using English, which made it more likely that they would have come across constructions with low frequency of use such as the focus constructions under investigation.

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3.5.4.3 Native speakers

The native English speakers group consisted of 31 British participants. They were all English teachers and members of the teaching staff for the preparatory year programme at Princess Norah bint Abdul Rahman University, Riyadh. All of the participants had obtained formal teaching qualifications in teaching English as a second language, such as CELTA (a certificate in teaching English to speakers of other languages) or DELTA (a diploma in teaching English to speakers of other languages). These teaching qualifications were required to qualify as a teacher at the preparatory year programme in the university. The native speakers were 28 to 38 years of age (M=30.24, SD 4.21). Their experience in teaching English at the preparatory year programme ranged between one year and four years.