Situación actual desde las cuatro perspectivas

This section outlines the analysis of the data. I begin with the surveys, followed by the journal entries and mealtime audio recordings, and finish with the face-to-face interviews.

Surveys

The surveys were analyzed by first tallying the rate of completion. Unfortunately, not all of the participants completed all the surveys every week. Given that these were part of the students’ weekly class assignments, some students chose not to complete all of the assignments. Just as students decide to do or not to do their homework, the participants in this class decided, at times, not to complete the surveys, which could be classified as homework. In spite of the deficiency, I was still able to draw conclusions and fill the gaps in the survey data with other data sources, such as the face-to-face interviews and journals.

The information from the surveys was put into an Excel spreadsheet to aid in finding similarities or differences among the student responses. I focused solely on information that spoke to either the general assumptions about study abroad (as discussed in Chapter 1), or aided in answering the research questions. For example, the last section of the background survey asked students to share what they wanted to accomplish while in Spain. Through the content of their responses, I could see some of the same study- abroad assumptions unfolding. I also analyzed the weekly surveys to find commonalities in the students’ use of technology and social media; their practices and interactions outside of the classroom; and their travels plans outside of Santander. The host family survey data was analyzed to find commonalities in student perceptions about their homestay, and student practices and activities with their host family.

Journal Entries

In addition to the survey, the participants also completed weekly electronic journal entries. As in the survey analysis, I began analyzing the journals by tallying their rate of completion. Even though all of the participants did not complete all the weekly journals, the information received from the face-to-face interviews solicited similar information, which allowed me to fill in information gaps and triangulate the data. The responses from the journals were combined in a Word document and then analyzed for commonalities that directly answered the research questions and supported the study- abroad assumptions discussed in Chapter 1. Not all of the journals entries were relevant to the current study, because I did not want students to discover that the research was specifically about their interactions while in Spain. Thus, some prompts were used as distracters. For example, the Journal #1 entry was about first impressions and culture shock, and was not relevant to the study because it did not solicit information about general study-abroad assumptions, student interactions, or use of technology. However, Journal #5 asked students to write about a goal they had prior to their sojourn and asked students if they accomplished that goal. The majority of the goals mentioned by students lined up with the general assumptions about study abroad. Participants #2, #4, and #5 specifically asked about student interactions, and I searched these entries to find patterns in how students interacted and with whom they interacted while abroad. Even though the students completed a host family survey at the end of the sojourn, the Journal #3 entry gave me a mid-sojourn look into host family-student relations. I searched these entries to see if any patterns of behavior or practices were forming between the students and their hosts.

Mealtime Audio Recordings

The audio recordings were analyzed differently from the surveys and journal entries. The recordings were not transcribed. The researcher conducted an auditory analysis by listening to the recordings and cataloguing their different aspects. First, I analyzed the recordings to uncover the topics of discussion and instances when the topic of discussion changed. During this analysis, I also noted which family member (i.e., Host Mom, Host Dad, Host Brother, etc.) or student was introducing new topics of conversation. Once I accumulated the list of topics with its accompanying family member for each recording, all the information was placed in an Excel file. The information was also tallied to find commonalities in topics of conversation among all the participants.

Second, I listened to the recordings to find and catalogue instances of breakdown in the conversations. This meant I searched for instances where students explicitly asked for help with grammar or lexicon, and instances where the host family used recast or scaffolding to aid or correct students during the conversations. Moreover, I formulated conclusions about why some participants had more instances of recast than others, such as the number of people at the table during the conversation or the level of student proficiency. I also looked for factors within the host family that may have affected how and when students were corrected—for example if a family had an adult child that spoke English, an English translation might be given to the student instead of a recast in Spanish.

Third, I listened to each recording and tallied the number of turns each individual had in each conversation. The turns of the students were coded into certain categories, such as one-word turns, five-word turns with a verb, or one-word utterances. This information was entered into an Excel file, and I tallied the results for each participant and found commonalities in the data from the group as a whole.

Face-to-Face Interviews With Researcher

Each participant had two face-to-face interviews with the researcher. The goal of the interviews was multidimensional. First, the interviews served to gain a general idea of the people the students interacted with and how the students enjoyed their study-abroad and host-family experience. Second, the interviews helped glean details about the learners’ habits outside of the classroom, such as where they were going and with whom. Additionally, the interviews opened an avenue to discuss the learners’ foreign language goals. The interviews also gave the researcher an opportunity to discuss the student—host family audio recordings with the subjects. During the interviews, the researcher asked questions about students’ level of comprehension when speaking with the host family and with which member of the host family they were most comfortable speaking. The researcher compiled data during and after the interviews. Then she analyzed the data to triangulate it with data from the journals and surveys to fill in any gaps that were present. Finally, the researcher aimed to find commonalities among the 13 participants, specifically as they related to answering the research questions.