The second article (see Uztosun et al., 2017) reported how student negotiation promoted student engagement, perceived speaking ability and willingness to communicate. After revisions which focused on the theoretical framework of the study and difficulties of showing the effectiveness of student negotiation in improving student negotiation, the article was published on 20 January 2017.
My preoccupation with providing empirical evidence on teaching and learning EFL speaking continued after my doctoral studies. I published an article describing the characteristics of pre-service teachers of EFL across Turkey in terms of language learning background (see Uztosun, 2017a), in which I commented on how many future teachers of English entered universities with limited language learning experience as this focused solely on grammar, vocabulary, and reading. The participants reported feeling least proficient in listening, speaking, and vocabulary. These findings provided support for the assumption that teaching speaking and listening is a major issue in EFL teacher education. This study encouraged me to investigate in-service EFL teachers’ views on the quality of ELT in Turkey, since I wanted to uncover problems that hinder the effectiveness of the ELT provided in state schools. The analysis of the data collected from a large group of participants (N = 2,476) showed that shifting the focus of ELT in Turkey to teaching listening and speaking could help to deal with some of the instructional problems that teachers reported encountering in teaching EFL (see Uztosun, 2018). In reviewing the literature related to teaching and learning EFL, I have found the term “student negotiation” to be of great interest as it seems to be highly relevant to improving EFL speaking skills. As a result, I developed a scale which I called the “self-regulated motivation for improving speaking English as a foreign language” (SRMIS-EFL) to measure the self-regulated speaking motivations of EFL learners (see Uztosun, 2017b). This is the only scale that measures self-regulated speaking motivation. Recently, I have conducted studies to test whether self-regulated speaking motivation is related to the development of EFL speaking skills. Considering the studies that I have conducted so far, it is clear that my doctoral research study increased my interest in teaching and learning speaking EFL.
Study Challenges, Constraints, and Limitations
The grounded theory allowed me to follow a systematic methodology for collecting and analyzing data throughout the study. Since I believed that the reality is in the data, not in the literature, I attempted to collect richer data from different perspectives and sources without relying on an existing theory. This increased the value of the research data. And I attempted to interpret it thoroughly. The major challenge was designing interventions according to students’ wants. Students reported mixed feelings about the content of classes and this made it difficult to design classes accordingly. Furthermore, students had limited repertoire of speaking activities and, therefore, they asked to include similar activities throughout the term. To avoid this, I sometimes needed to include different activities to contribute to students’ repertoires of speaking activities. I justified the content of classes each week so that students understand how I implemented student negotiation.
The study inevitably had its constraints and limitations. The main constraint was that it did not test whether student-negotiated speaking classes improved students’ EFL speaking competence. We avoided this because it would have involved the testing of speaking, which in turn would have made the research procedure very complex. Student negotiation is unlikely to improve students’ EFL speaking competence over a limited period of time, and a focus on testing the changes in students’ speaking competences might well have hindered the exploration of important issues that student-negotiated speaking classes had an impact on. In addition, testing students’ speaking performances could have influenced the trustworthiness of the data collected: students could be biased if the research involved testing their speaking competence. Instead, we focused on certain important issues that might indicate the development of EFL speaking skills, such as perceived competence, satisfaction with speaking ability, perceived involvement, anxiety, and willingness to communicate.
The main limitation of the research was its reliance on self-reported data. This is one of the limitations of questionnaires (Dörnyei, 2002) and interviews (Kvale, 1996), in that participants may not provide trustworthy answers, especially when they give information about their perceptions, because of such issues as social desirability and self-deception (Dörnyei, 2002). Although we attempted to overcome this problem through triangulating the data by using observations, this issue remains as one of the limitations. Furthermore, like all classroom research studies, the Hawthorne effect, which is the influence of being researched on behaviors of the participants (Cook, 1962), was a possible limitation of the study. Knowing that they were taking part in a research study, students may have behaved differently in speaking activities. These limitations are important issues to consider in future research studies within a related area.
Research Issues
Researchers need to address several issues to improve the quality of their research. An important criterion for good qualitative research is trustworthiness, which is mainly determined by “…whether the data analyses, reports and interpretations constitute honest and authentic reconstruction of the research…” (Burns, 2010b, p. 85). To ensure trustworthiness, researchers are expected to report their research (e.g., research context, and data research procedures) in a detailed, fair, and unbiased way (Burns, 1999; McKay, 2006; Patton, 1980). To address these issues, my dissertation and our articles presented detailed information regarding the context, problems, procedures, data collection tools, and finding of the research.
Some of the criteria for trustworthiness are credibility, dependability, and transferability (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). While credibility concerns whether the research findings are true and plausible, dependability is about the stability of the findings over time. To address these criteria, our research comprised eight interventions throughout a term to make sure that the data were comprehensive, and the findings were consistent. On the other hand, transferability refers to the applicability of the research to other contexts (McKay, 2006). Providing a detailed description of the research procedure is a significant way of increasing transferability.
A common way of ensuring the quality of qualitative research is using triangulation. According to Burns (1999), triangulation is a means of promoting the trustworthiness of a research study through including multiple perspectives on the topic under investigation. Triangulation is the combination of several observers, methods, and data sources (Denzin, 1970, cited in Patton, 1980), and, hence, makes it possible to avoid presuppositions or biases when drawing conclusions and reflecting on the data gathered (Burns, 2010a).
Patton (1980) proposed four types of triangulation: “methods triangulation,” “triangulation of sources,” “analyst triangulation,” and “theory/perspective triangulation.” While methods triangulation is collecting both quantitative and qualitative data, triangulation of sources involves using different qualitative data collection tools with the aim of checking whether these lead to similar findings. Analyst triangulation is the involvement of more people in the data analysis stage, and theory triangulation implies addressing different theoretical perspectives to analyze the same data set (Patton, 1980). My doctoral research rested upon methods triangulation and triangulation of sources, since both qualitative and quantitative data were collected by using four different methods.
From a narrower perspective, the quality of an action research study depends on the extent to which it improves educational practices (Burns, 1999). According to this assumption, our research can be considered beneficial, because the interventions had a positive impact on issues relevant to the effectiveness of EFL speaking classes. In addition to the criteria that are mentioned above, Burns (1999) synthesized different qualitative criteria for action research studies (Table 3.3).
Table 3.3 Validity criteria for action research (Burns, 1999, pp. 161–162)