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I developed an initial list of names of potential participants from the class lists of ESL and communication courses I had taught, from the class lists of the other ESL instructor at the college, and from my ESL Coordinator files. However, I was concerned that this list would yield a fairly undiversified sample of the bilingual learners who attend Alverno College because those who are referred to our classes or to me as ESL

14 Although the pilot survey had a subsection on listening skills, I excluded it from the final survey because listening is implicated in speaking and is less directly related to writing than the other skills on the survey.

Coordinator are generally experiencing some kind of academic difficulty. To diversify the pool of participants, I contacted the student leaders of each of the four ethnic/cultural clubs on campus about distributing the survey to their groups. Two of the groups

responded. In addition, once the interviews began, I mined the interviewees’ “network of friends or acquaintances” for names (Johnstone, 2000, p. 92) by asking them to

recommend any peers they thought might be interested in participating in the study.

Certainly, the friends’ and acquaintances’ names came from participants whose

experience with the survey and the interview were positive (it is unlikely to recommend the name of a friend for an activity that we feel was unfair or a waste of time). Their positive recommendations may have added individuals to my sample who were

predisposed to have positive feelings about the topic of my study. Yet, given my initial sources’ bias toward students who had experienced academic difficulty, I hoped the participants’ recommendations might turn up the names of bilingual learners I did not know because they had experienced no particular academic difficulty, thus balancing my sample. Indeed, this occurred; although the interviewees suggested students I had already contacted, they also gave me the names of others who had been unknown to me because of their unmarked progress through the curriculum.

Each potential participant, except for those in the student club who wanted an in-person visit, was e-mailed a request letter that included a link to the survey (see Appendix B for a copy of the letter). Students who were willing to participate in the study clicked on the link that took them to the SurveyMonkey survey. For the ethnic club that asked for an in-person visit, I had to adapt the consent and data collection techniques. I decided to present the information in the consent form orally as well as in writing. Furthermore,

although I used the same survey, it had to be adapted for a paper format. For example, instead of buttons to click on, there were blanks in which to make a check mark (see Appendix C). When I attended the club meeting, I handed out and orally highlighted the information in the participation request letter and answered the students’ questions.

Afterward, I distributed the paper surveys to the three students who asked for them.

In all, I e-mailed 79 requests for participation and presented the request for

participation orally to four members of the club I visited in person. Due to privacy issues, I do not know how many request letters the two student clubs forwarded to their

members. However, I know that I received survey responses from participants whose names were neither on my list nor recommended by interviewees, assuring me that the student clubs had followed through. Twenty-six students completed the on-line survey, and three students completed the paper survey, yielding a total of 29 participants. I estimate that this number represents nearly a 30% response rate.

3.2.3 Survey collection and analysis

I created a numbering system to keep track of the returned surveys. Each time an online survey was returned, the consent page, which included the participant’s name, was printed, numbered, and filed in a master notebook along with the consent pages from the paper surveys. This system kept the survey data itself anonymous, yet allowed me to go back and connect it to a participant if I needed to ask a follow-up question. Later, when a participant was interviewed, I checked the master notebook and filed her interview under the same number as her survey, permitting me to connect the interview with her survey data.

I created charts to prepare the survey data for later analysis. Comments and explanations that participants had written in the comment boxes or that I had elicited in a follow-up e-mail were added to the charts as footnotes. I converted the data from the “can do” items on the survey into numerical scores. Each “can do” item is followed by a series of five tasks to each of which the participants assigned one of four ratings. During the primary phase of my analysis, I assigned a value to each of the four ratings, for instance:

Not Able = 0, With Great Difficulty = 1, With Some Difficulty = 2, and Quite Easily = 3.

If, for example, a participant rated her performance of each L1 reading task as “Quite Easily,” she received three points for each of the five tasks, giving her a total of 15 points for L1 reading skills¹⁵. For all of the L1 use questions except one, I was able to compare the participants L1 use simply by comparing their total scores.

The exception to this simple comparison process was Question 21 (How often do you speak your native language?) because the respondents did not have to respond to each item listed below the question. Figure 3-1 shows Question 21 in its entirety.

15 On the Background Information section of the survey, Question 20 (How often do you do translating and/or writing in English for members of the family?), also gave four choices of response. I used the same process to convert the participants’ responses into a numerical value.

Figure 3-1: Survey Item #20 (paper survey format)

As can be seen from Figure 3-1, this question required one more step to make the scores comparable because participants who did not have a job and/or did not attend church were directed to leave those choices blank. As with the other questions, each response choice was assigned a numerical value between 0 (Not at All) and 3 (Almost Always), and the points were added to arrive at a total for Question 21. Depending on how many of the items a participant responded to, she could have a possible maximum of 18 (all six items were rated), 15 (five items were rated), or 12 (only four items were rated) points.

Thus, each participant’s score was calculated as a percentage of the possible total of 18, 15, or 12, depending on the number of choices she left blank.

How often do your speak your native language a. at home (your permanent address)?

____Not at all _____Sometimes _____Often _____Almost Always b. with your friends?

____Not at all _____Sometimes _____Often _____Almost Always c. in the classroom at school?

____Not at all _____Sometimes _____Often _____Almost Always d. at work? (If you don’t have a job, leave this blank.)

____Not at all _____Sometimes _____Often _____Almost Always e. at church? (If you don’t attend church, leave this blank.)

____Not at all _____Sometimes _____Often _____Almost Always f. elsewhere? (If you don’t speak your first language anywhere else, leave this blank.) ____Not at all _____Sometimes _____Often _____Almost Always