Estrategia de categorización en contexto

Questionnaires are “written instruments that present respondents with a series of questions or statements to which they are to react, either by writing out their answers or selecting from among existing answers” (Brown 2001, cited in Nunan & Bailey 2009: 126). They belong to the psychometric tradition, but in this study there was no intervention, as in experiments, by manipulating variables. The attempt was to design the questionnaire so that it could capture the relevant information and elicit teachers’ ideas and attitudes, without influencing the data. The sampling occurred on the basis of a “convenience” (cf. Patton 2002 quoted in Flick 2009: 122) procedure. All participants in the workshop sessions were chosen as the “nearest

individuals” (Nunan & Bailey 2009: 128). It was assumed that this population was a representative sample from the teacher population as a whole, at least with regard to the “motivated” teachers who were voluntarily taking part in the workshop sessions. The sample is not representative of “all” language teachers in that the results cannot be generalised and extended to the “unmotivated” teachers who did not participate in the program.

The questionnaire (see Appendix 1) began with biographical data, asking which foreign languages they have learned, which language they teach and how long they have been teaching it, which kind of courses and how long they have been teaching and what other teacher training they had already attended. Two sections with questions to answer before and after the workshops followed.

Despite the practicality of using closed-items97 (Nunan & Bailey 2009: 130), open-ended questions were chosen as more appropriate in order not to influence the participants. Being interested in their ideas, and as their true answers were desired (Neuman 2000 as cited in Hahn 2007: 62), standardized questions were avoided98. Whereas the disadvantage of closed- items is that respondents tend to “rush through a questionnaire and simply mark all the positive options without really thinking about their content” (Nunan & Bailey 2009: 135), the disadvantage of open-items is that some respondents could be annoyed by being compelled to reflect.

The questionnaire was distributed among the participants according to a pre-post mode (Freeman 1996: 32 speaks of pre-post questionnaires) in which the participants filled out the first part before the workshop began. The second part was completed at the end of the workshop sessions and the questionnaire was then collected on the same day.

Although the questionnaire as a survey method usually relies on statistical generalisation (Nunan & Bailey: 174), in the present study it was not used for quantifications or generalisations.

The design of the questionnaires

The questionnaires consisted of twenty questions99, which were all open-ended and for which there was no right or wrong answer. The questions 1 to 9 were asked prior to the workshops, whereas the questions 10 to 20 were distributed after the workshops.

97 _{Nunan & Bailey (2009: 130) report quick responses. Further advantages for the researcher are their greater} comparability for data analysis, greater uniformity and greater reliability (Mackey & Gass 2005 cited in Nunan & Bailey 2009: 137).

98

Through answering open-ended questions people can “express their own thoughts and ideas in their own manner” (Mackey & Gass 2005 cited in Nunan & Bailey 2009: 137)

The questions pre-workshop were conceived as an advance organizer and as such sought to “tune in” the participants to the task by directing the participants’ attention to some aspects of their own learning, such as teachers' prior knowledge, relevance of the topics for them or expectations. These basic questions on what the course was going to be about, what their reasons for attending the session were, and what their expectations were, were considered fundamental. There is notable evidence of top-down processing from research on comprehension processes: learners’ goals, knowledge, beliefs, plans and expectations play an important role in determining how to interpret what we perceive (Rumelhart 1977; Woods 1996: 85). The importance of activating prior knowledge is also echoed in Oxford (1996: xi) “Learning strategy investigations within and outside the language field have shown that effective learners actively associate new information with existing information”. For this reason, in the questionnaires the teachers were asked to express what they knew about the topic and to explore their beliefs and reactions, in order to support them in making their personal frames of reference explicit, or externalizing their own personal theory.

The questions post-workshop had the purpose to sensitise the teachers towards ‘scanning oneself’, considering any benefit from the workshops and taking stock of the situation. Some of the questions may sound obvious, as the following one: “Why is the topic relevant to me?”. The questions indeed rely on insights from the literature according to which many learners are not aware of their own learning (Götz 2006: 14). Further, Flavell underlines that adult cognition is very often of “shockingly poor” quality (Flavell 2002: 168). On the whole, the answers to the post-workshop questionnaires were very positive and enthusiastic. The great majority wrote that they had learned and were thankful for the opportunity to attend the workshops.

Overall, all the questions were intended to be ‘sensitisers’, i.e. to render the teachers sensitive to their professional learning and to their active contribution to it. The questions had a meta- cognitive accent in that they were awareness-raising (the focus in the questionnaires promoted self-awareness of the learning process). Despite the assumed usefulness of the questions, it is worth noting that this pause to reflect may not always be welcome by all the teachers. Some of them could feel it tedious to pass oneself in review after a busy day or in the middle of the semester, and some teachers could likely feel uncomfortable with it100. Furthermore, forethought, planning, and proactive performance are “mentally and physically demanding activities” (Zimmerman 2000: 31).

100 _{Tediousness is also reported in the literature as one factor that interferes with the fundamental task of} monitoring one’s progress towards one’s goals (Gourgey 2001: 30).