Especialidad Arquitectura

Semi-structured interviews are the most important and widely used type of

interviews in applied linguistics (Gillham, 2005; Dornyei, 2007). That is mainly

because while they require the preparation of questions to be asked and prompts to

be used, they also give the interviewer and the interviewee the freedom to explore

certain issues within the context of the study. Gillham (2005) summarizes the

features of semi-structured interviews as follows:

 The same questions are asked of all those involved;

 The kind and form of questions go through a process of development to ensure their topic focus;

 To ensure equivalent coverage (with an eye to the subsequent comparative analysis) interviewees are prompted by supplementary questions if they

have not dealt spontaneously with one of the sub-areas of interest;

 Approximately equivalent interview time is allowed in each case.

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 Probes are used according to whether the interviewer judges there is more to be disclosed at a particular point in the interview (p. 17)

Another feature of the semi-structured interview is the requirement of a ‘piloting’

(Gillham, 2005) or ‘initial sampling’ (Dornyei, 2007) and an ‘interview guide’ due to

its ‘structured’ nature. The piloting procedure also requires attention, mainly

because it will reveal the possible deficits in wording of questions, changes in

question focus, and flow of the conversation with the actual participants of the

study. For my case, as I used the semi-structural interview as the type of interview, I

conducted a pilot interview with one of my fellow PhD students in the department.

Even though she was not directly related to the topic of my study, I had to chance to

elaborate on my interview skills such as the initial contact, the orientation of the

questions, the flow of conversation, the probes and feedback I used, how to close the

session, etc., along with the practical issues such as the preparation of the setting

and the recording instruments. At the time I started conducting interviews with the

actual participants of my study, in retrospect, the pilot interview allowed me to be

more self confident with the process as I had a mental and a written interview

guide. The development of the interview guide grew together with the research

questions. I thought over the responses I would like to obtain in order to shed light

on my research questions.

The first step was asking interviewees (student teachers) to talk through the general

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questions included their opinions about the support they got from the university

tutor, the supervisor teacher at the school they were teaching and the contents of the

course. My aim in asking these preliminary questions was to establish initial contact

and to make the interviewees feel comfortable by talking about general issues and

exploring remarks to code switching. Remaining questions consisted of asking them

to talk about the practice of exchanging between languages, at which stage of lesson

and why they did it, and how they felt about the practice of it and whether they

were encouraged or discouraged to the practice of this by any other source (tutor,

supervisor or the school board). This represents the contents of the interview data

and I will address issues in analysis and interpretation later in the data analysis and

discussion sections. At this point, a discussion on the interactive nature of the

relationship between the interviewer and interviewee needs to be explored;

however I will turn to it after a brief discussion of the stimulated recall interview

from the perspective of data collection. A more detailed discussion of stimulated

recall as a method will be provided in a separate section.

In addition to the types of interviews mentioned above, face-to-face interviews also

include focus group interviews (not used in this study) and introspective methods

such as think-aloud technique, retrospective interview or stimulated recall – which

is a part of this study.

Introspective methods, as the name suggests, aim to examine or observe one’s

mental or emotional processes. The implementation of introspective methods was

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these methods is “helping the respondents to vocalize what is/was going through

their minds when making a judgement, solving a problem or performing a task”

(Dornyei, 2007, p. 147). Therefore the data obtained from introspective methods are

in the form of a ‘verbal report’ or ‘verbal protocol’. After the recognition of the

importance of one’s mental processes and consciousness, introspective methods

started to be used in more studies in applied linguistics (Kormos, 1998 cited in

Dornyei, 2007, p. 148).

One introspective method is think-aloud technique. The aim of this technique is to

ensure participants to ‘vocalize’ their thoughts while carrying out a task (Ericsson,

2002). This technique also covers the ‘inner speech’ of the participants without any

interventions, explanation or analysis. (Dornyei, 2007). The role of the researcher

during the think aloud task is to encourage the participant to continue talking while

carrying out the activity.

The retrospective interview or stimulated recall also focuses on the participants’

expression of thoughts but in this case after completing a task or mental process.

According to Ericsson (2002), the amount of time between the task and the recall

interview is vital because if there is a long interval between the action and the recall

interview, the recall of the action will be poor. As it is difficult to conduct interviews

right after the action in applied linguistics, Gass and Mackey (2000) suggests the use

of a stimulus to support the recall process. This stimulus can be a video of the

participant’s performance or written work produced by him/her (Dornyei, 2007). In

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teachers; every student teacher and the researcher watched the videos taped while

they were teaching. They were asked to make comments on their performances and

respond to the questions I asked while they were watching. A more detailed

analysis of stimulated recall will be presented below in a separate section.

3.5.5 Interviewer-Interviewee Relationship (the roles of interviewer and