The deliberate practice phase took place over a period of six one-hour sessions. I started the deliberate practice phase by briefly explaining to the students what is meant by the term and the elements necessary for practice to be considered „deliberate practice‟ as opposed to other forms of practice. After giving them a brief idea about the concept, I drew the deliberate practice diagram as shown below.
The diagram is based on elements of deliberate practice as mentioned in the literature (see Section 2.5.3). These elements can be categorized into internal factors, such as concentration and motivation, as opposed to external ones, such as teacher, task and feedback. Each session in phase two opened up with a brief recap on the elements of deliberate practice, with particular emphasis on the internal factors of motivation and concentration which were under the control of the participants. The external factors, on the contrary, were under my control and did not need to be emphasised each time as they were due to take place as planned. I was playing the role of the tutor in each single session, providing feedback to students and allowing for repeated performance. I also had prepared for each session 2-3 listening texts and gave the participants an accompanying task to perform after listening.
Since “extensive experience of activities in a domain” are characteristic of deliberate practice (Ericsson, 2006b, p. 685), I decided this time to give the participants as many listening texts as the one hour session permits. Instead of having only one listening text, as in the metacognitive instruction phase, this time the students were given more listening input, with either two lectures in one session or one lecture and a conversation or two, depending on the length and difficulty of the texts. As far as the three constraints identified by Ericsson et al. (1993) which are inherent in the attainment of exceptional performance (see Section 2.5.3), motivation was tackled by voluntary participation as well as reinforcing the importance of it at the start of each DP session; resource was in my hands as I was available in all sessions, and I had CDs and a laptop, plus enough photocopies of tasks for each session; finally, the effort constraint was tackled by limiting each training session to just under an hour of deliberate practice.
Aside from emphasising the importance of motivation and concentration at the start of each DP session, my role as a teacher followed the conventions of teaching listening in this context, which resembles most features of the comprehension approach to teaching listening. During the deliberate practice phase, the students were only asked to give a summary or an outline for the lectures they listened to, rather than having various tasks as in phase one. Students were given the chance to
listen to each lecture twice. The conversations and short discussions, on the other hand, were followed with multiple choice questions and were played only once due to them being short and rather simple as compared to lectures. As mentioned previously, I introduced some changes to the diary probes in phase two. The questions this time were given only in English, though participants were still given the freedom to choose the language they would like to answer in. The participants used more English in the deliberate practice phase when answering the listening diary probes, even though this was not an aim in itself. They also tended to be more organized in their responses to the diary probes by breaking the response into idea units by either numbering the idea units, breaking them up by using a dash or slash, or writing each idea unit on a separate line. This made the analysis of phase two diaries easier for me.
I was meeting students in small groups, similar to what took place in the first phase, based on their free hours which was an advantage and disadvantage at the same time; an advantage because it gave me the chance to be closer to the participants and provide them with the support they needed. However, it was a disadvantage because sometimes I had to introduce changes based on the experience I had with a group of them, and this sometimes affected the number of texts they had the chance to listen to. As mentioned above, I aimed to give the participants as much practice as possible in the deliberate practice phase. Hence, I gave the ten participants in the first class two lectures to listen to. They were required to write an outline for each lecture and then fill in the listening diary. I was surprised to find out that the participants were not used to writing an outline from scratch; so, it took them a long time to produce an outline for each lecture and they had to rush through the listening diaries. Based on that, I had to take a couple of decisions and introduce some changes in the structure of the deliberate practice phase sessions. First, I decided to give the other group of participants, whom I had not seen at this point, just one lecture in their first session in the deliberate practice phase. This decision enabled me to have more time to introduce the concept of deliberate practice to them. Also, it gave me more time to provide participants with informative feedback on the tasks they have carried out, which is an essential element in deliberate practice. Second, since I aimed for as much listening practice as possible, and one hour sessions were not enough for two
lectures, I decided to include one or two short discussions or dialogues, time permitting, along with a lecture in the following sessions. I also decided to ask participants to write summaries rather than outlines. The only time I asked for an outline after session one, they were given some prompts and were required to fill in the missing information. I reviewed with them the main ideas in a lecture and supporting details as a form of informative feedback. I also provided written feedback to each individual‟s summary. As for the conversations and short discussions, the tasks were mainly multiple choice questions. Once the students completed the task, we answered the questions together and they were required to correct their mistakes and give themselves a mark. This helped them recognize their mistakes instantly. Table 3.4 below presents details of the texts and tasks covered in each of the six sessions in this phase. As the table illustrates, the students were given 2-3 listening texts per session, which allowed for repeated performance. Further, feedback was given on each single task the students had completed.
Session Topic Text Task 1 (a) Pros & cons of video games on
children
Lecture Outline from scratch
1 (b) Genetically modified food Lecture Outline
2 (a) Student consulting with professor Conversation 5 MCQs
2(b) How different animals hear Lecture Summary
3(a) Student consulting with lab assistant Conversation 5 MCQs
3(b) Student consulting with professor Conversation 5 MCQs
3(c) Historical fiction Lecture summary
4(a) Student consulting with a university worker on applying for scholarship
Conversation 5 MCQs
4(b) Student consulting with her advisor on her schedule plan
Conversation 5 MCQs
4(c) Opportunity cost (Economics) Lecture Outline with
some missing lines
5(a) Student consulting with a university worker on student newspaper
Conversation 5 MCQs
5(b) Discussion in a physiology class on fractures
Discussion 2 MCQs & 2 matching
5(c) Zoology class on hibernation Lecture Summary
6(a) Chemistry class on carbon atoms Discussion 6 MCQs
6(b) Internet addiction disorder Lecture Summary
Table 3.4 Summary of Phase Two Sessions
3.8 Summary
In the present chapter, I gave a detailed account of the research design of this study and outlined the principles behind the research methodology used. As Table 3.1
above illustrates, I designed the research to take account of the principles of deliberate practice and ensured I applied each of these principles in the listening training sessions. I presented in this chapter the research design, ethical considerations, sampling procedures, data collection instruments and data generation stages. The study, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, is a mixed-methods, quasi-experimental one in which I generated both QUAL and QUAN datasets. Hence, I will present the analysis procedures for each of these two datasets in the following chapter, along with the results.