Qualitative data were to be collected in the form of an oral interview carried out with a sub-sample of twelve learners representing all schools involved in the research, two learners per school. Oral interviews were aimed at getting a more detailed insight into young learners’ attitudes to reading and their motivation for regular extensive reading. Prompted think-aloud protocol was to be conducted face-to-face with individual learners. It was planned to last up to 45 minutes, i.e. a regular class time, to be audio recorded and later transribed and analysed. Since “protocol analysis or, more literally, think-aloud protocol approach, aims to elicit the inner thoughts or cognitive processes that illuminate what’s going on in a person’s head during the performance of a task” (Patton, 2002, p. 385), interviewing should be done as close to the action as possible, even while the activity is being done, and the interviewer’s
151 questions and probes should elicit the respondent’s thoughts related to the action itself. These concurrent explanations are thought to be more reliable than retrospective descriptions that happen after the action because they are not negatively affected by short-term memory recall processes of the respondent (Patton, 2002). However, verbalising one’s thoughts, i.e. ‘internal dialogues’, requires guidance and training and does not happen spontaneously. As training could not be organised due to very significant time burden for the researcher and big logistical problems of making schedules both for the qualitative survey and the interviews, the learners were given a lot of guidance and encouragement to speak while thinking and solving comprehension problems in the course of the interviews.
Establishing rapport with the interviewee, but staying neutral, is a key to success in the process of interviewing. Patton (2002) argues that rapport “means that I respect the people being interviewed, so what they say is important because of who is saying it,” while neutrality “means that the person being interviewed can tell me anything without endangering either my favour or disfavour with regard to the content of her or his response” (p. 364). The researcher planned to establish rapport in the beginning by asking a few general questions about reading in the learner’s mother tongue, by carefully listening to the interviewee and showing that in feedback by repeating the interviewee’s responses neutrally, by using probes that would enable the child to keep talking on the aspect he or she personally found very important, not worrying about being judged, by observing for the signs child’s of fatigue, by giving the child a lot of time to think about the questions and probes and to respond to them.
The interview questions were grouped into four sections. The purpose of the first section was to help the interviewee feel relaxed and unthreatened, so the questions were: “Do you like reading? How do you feel when reading a book in Serbian?” The second section was an introduction to the prompted think-aloud reading task and the questions related to the learner’s experience in reading in English: “Do you like reading in English? Do you read in
152 English for pleasure in your free time? When do you usually read in English? What texts do you read in english? How do you feel when you are reading a book or a story in English? How do you choose what to read in English? Do you choose the texts that are not too difficult? Do you read in English on the internet? Do you read in English on the internet to learn something? Do you read in English with your parents or siblings? Do you like to read in English with them? Why?”
The third section was the reading task and prompted think-aloud protocol related to it. It was the most important part of the interview and was therefore placed in the middle. MacKay and Gass (2005) argue that it is the middle position is the best position for the crucial interview questions “because the interviewee may be nervous in the beginning and tired by the end” (p. 175). At the beginning of the third section the interviewer was to give the learner a page with a picture and a three-paragraph text, without a title (229 words). The learner was first to be invited to look at the picture and try to predict what the story would be about. After that the learner would be instructed to read the first paragraph aloud, and then his or her comprehension would be checked by asking him or her questions related to the content of the paragraph; after that, and the learner would be invited to say aloud his or her thoughts related to the story and its context, and also to predict the development of the story in the next paragraph. The questions and prompts were to be: “What has happened in the story so far? What are you thinking about while reading? What is important in this part of the story? What catches your attention in the picture? Can you relate it to the paragraph you have just read? What do you think will happen further in the story? How do you know it?” The learner would be allowed to look back at the story, reread parts and think aloud about the meaning. He or she would be probed to guess how to pronounce new vocabulary and to make guesses about the meaning of unfamiliar words. The same procedure was to be repeated in reading the second paragraph, but before the third, the final paragraph, the learner would be instructed to
153 read the paragraph silently and would be then asked a set of slightly modified questions: “What is happening at the end of the story? Can you relate this paragraph to the picture? What were you thinking about while reading silently? Did you reread some parts of the paragraph? Which ones? Why?” After this discussion, the child would be asked to read the final paragraph aloud and was to be asked a couple of questions: “When did you understand the text better, when reading silently or aloud? Why? What helped you understand better in that mode?”
The text was taken from Cambridge English Young Learners: Young Learners English Tests: Sample Papers – Flyers (2013) (see Appendix 2). Linguistic analysis of the reading text for prompted think-aloud protocol interview shows that it consisted of three paragraphs of different length and linguistic difficulty; it contained 229 words in 22 sentences (13 simple and 9 complex sentences), the average length of sentences being 10.4 words. Individual reading performance was rated on two dimensions of literacy: 1. reading aloud; 2. reading comprehension. Running records were used to assess sub-sample learners’ “current abilities and weaknesses in reading” by listening to them reading and recording their errors and corrections: mispronunciations, substitutions, omissions or self-corrections (Greig et al., 2012, p. 126). However, instead of using a standardised running record developed by Clay (1993), we used a copy of the reading text to highlight the parts of the text where errors and corrections appeared, which later helped in transcribing the interviews and reading sessions that had been audio recorded.
The text incorporated the topic that all participants had covered in regular classes or at least had had some contact with. It included the past tense which had already been introduced at the end of Grade 4 and in the initial months of Grade 5 (regular verbs had been introduced and practised in classes). However, it was considerably above the level of what Grade 5 learners would be given as reading material: it was longer than the usual texts for the
154 respective grade, contained many examples of past tense verbs, comprised nine complex sentences (40.9 per cent), and generally sentences were long (with average number of 10.4 words). To assist comprehension through strategy use, the text included schema clues, in the way Macaro and Erler (2008) described the reading texts used in studying inferencing strategies of young learners of French.
The last section of the interview referred to the story as a whole. The learner was to be asked to express his or her thoughts, feelings and attitudes related to the content, language, his or her reading difficulties and solutions to the problems encountered in reading. This part of the interview was semistructured and flexible, and would depend on each individual’s level of reading proficiency. The questions were divided into four groups: Group One questions: “Do you like this story? Which part do you like most? While you were reading the story, were you thinking about how much you could understand it? Did you manage to guess what the first/second/third paragraph would be about? How did you manage to make a successful guess? What helped you to guess the content?”; Group Two questions: “How much do you understand this story? What is it about? What title would you give it? Is there a part of the story you found difficult to understand? What couldn’t you understand? Do you know all words in the story? What helped you to undestand the unfamiliar words? What could you have done to understand the story better in spite of not knowing all words?” Group Three questions: “Is this word familiar to you? Can you read it? How did you know how to pronounce it? What helped you? What were you thinking while getting read yto reda it? Did you remember something? Anuthing else? What does it (the word) mean? How do you know it?”; Group Four questions: “How does the reading skill in Serbian help you in reading in English? How much is reading in Serbian similar to/different from reading in English? What is your biggest difficulty in reading in English? How do you overcome it? Did you learn that strategy in your English classes? Who from? Did you ask for help? Who from? Does that
155 always help you when you read in English? Does anything else help you to read better in English? Do you have a plan how to practice reading in English? Have you already noticed that you are now reading better? How did you come to that conclusion?” The answers were to be analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively, within content analysis. Moreover, the results were planned to be compared to the results obtained with other instruments.