INSTITUTO NACIONAL DE PATRIMONIO CULTURAL

3.5.5.1. Rationale for a questionnaire survey

The survey has been widely employed in social science research as a method of collecting information about people’s opinions, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, needs, motivations and behaviour (Fink, 2002) as well as in the field of EFL education (Gorsuch, 2000). Researchers choose to use a survey because it is cost-effective, easy to administer and anonymous. It is also an effective way to gather the required information from a large number of respondents, allowing them time to consider answers and impose uniformity by asking the same questions (Cohen et al., 2007). The purpose for employing a questionnaire survey in this study was threefold: (i) to gather demographic information about the respondents, (ii) to establish an understanding of how they feel about the practicum’s effectiveness, and (iii) to use this quantitative data as a source for triangulation with the qualitative data.

3.5.5.2. The content design of the questionnaire

The researcher designed a content structure for the trainee teacher questionnaire based on the constructs and themes identified from the review of literature and from consultations with the research supervisors and colleagues, who were experts in the field of ELT and EFL teacher education. Since the participants would be teaching English at high schools, the instrument was designed and written in English. The questionnaire consisted of four sections; each was to collect different information from or about the trainee teachers: Section I demographic information, Section II general reflections on the teaching practicum, Section III perceptions of the learning to teach process, and Section IV concerns about the teaching practicum’s effectiveness (Appendix 9).

The questionnaire consisted of both close-ended and open-ended items. While the close-ended questions in the questionnaire aimed to identify the trainee teachers’ evaluation of their learning, their teaching performance in the teaching practicum as well as the practicum’s effectiveness, the open- ended items sought to elicit participants’ views and comments on these issues. The close-ended questions were based on a five-point Likert scale to obtain the respondents’ degree of agreement or disagreement, ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. This is one of the most commonly accepted and used rating scales in educational research (Fraenkel & Wallen, 2000) and in EFL research (Hatch & Lazaraton, 1991).

3.5.5.3. Piloting of questionnaire

Before the questionnaire was distributed, the researcher conducted a pilot study with ten trainee teachers who were purposely chosen from one of the three participating institutions based on convenience sampling. The pilot study served three aims. First, it sought to assess the quality of the survey instrument to ensure that the items were clearly understood. Fraenkel and Wallen (2000) claimed that piloting is crucial before the main study in detecting any problems with the instrument variables so that they could be remedied. Second, by trialling the instrument, the researcher can gain a sense of the practical aspects of administering the questionnaire, such as the time required to complete the survey and the clarity of the instructions, as well as the physical layout of the instrument. Finally, a pilot study is directly related to the issues of reliability and validity (Seliger & Shohamy, 1989). From the results of the pilot study, the researcher could check internal consistency by computing the reliability coefficient of each construct and each theme. After the pilot testing of the questionnaire, a number of questions were adjusted by deleting, adding or modifying some words to avoid uncertainty. Table 3.8 summarizes the structure and themes of the revised survey eventually employed in the main study.

Table 3.8. Structure and themes of the questionnaire

Structure Themes Items

Part I Demographic Information Institution Gender Age English proficiency Teaching experience 5 I.1 I.2 I.3 I.4 I.5 Part II

Reflections on the teaching practicum The teaching contexts

The instructional difficulties

15 II.1-8 II. 9-15

Part III

The process of learning to teach The acquisition of knowledge The acquisition of skills The acquisition of dispositions

30 III.A.1-12 III.B.1-13 III.C.1-5

Part IV

Issues concerning the teaching practicum effectiveness Organization Assessment Support Recommendations 12 III. 1-3 III. 4-5 III. 6-9 III. 10-12 3.5.5.4. Distribution of questionnaires

The questionnaires were distributed to the trainee teachers at the end of the teaching practicum. It was quite difficult to meet all the targeted trainee teachers at the host schools because there were more than 30 host schools scattered around urban and rural areas of HCMC. To solve this issue and to support a high rate of return, all questionnaires were distributed with the help of the university

lecturers and the administrative staff of the English departments at each university. The questionnaires were handed to the trainee teachers in person by the university lecturers, department secretaries, the class monitors or by the researcher. In most cases, the monitors of the classes were asked to help distribute and collect the questionnaires from the students, after which they handed them all to the researcher or the departments’ secretaries who then gave them to the researcher later.

3.5.5.5. Reliability and validity of the survey instrument

All the questionnaire items including both Likert scale and open-ended questions were developed from the theoretical and empirical literature and were scrutinized and edited by the researcher’s supervisors regarding the wording, ordering and structure of the questions, and the response alternatives in order to improve validity. The validity of the questionnaire was reviewed and approved by the supervisors. The reliability and validity of the questionnaire was also confirmed through the piloting process with the target participants. In the pilot study, the reliability of the questionnaire was measured through statistics of Cronbach’s alpha on 54 Likert items to identify whether they had acceptable internal consistency. Items measuring the same construct were grouped to calculate the Cronbach’s alpha coefficients as reported in Table 3.9.

Table 3.9. Cronbach’s alpha values of the survey

Categories Items (No) Cronbach’s alpha

Reflections on the teaching practicum The teaching contexts

The instructional difficulties

8 7

0.78 0.82 The process of learning to teach

The acquisition of knowledge The acquisition of skills The acquisition of dispositions

12 13 5 0.75 0.73 0.84

Issues concerning the practicum effectiveness 9 0.76

The resulting alpha values in each section varied between 0.75 and 0.84, which indicates a high internal consistency since the cut-off point for an acceptable level of internal reliability is generally 0.6 (Gomm, 2008).