Considering my research topic, I’ve thought about narrowing the broad idea of something to do with Spanish oral language down to investigating the specific strategies that high school Spanish teachers use to foment oral proficiency. I recall from my experience in Spanish classes (in high school and college), that my instructors had us do diverse things from answering questions aloud, reading passages aloud, holding informal conversations to doing imaginary skits. By investigating this, I can find out the frequency in which teachers employ these strategies, how affective they believe they are, and their attitudes towards employing them.
Now continuing this process of thinking out loud (in sense), I must consider the methodologies I could use to pursue this topic. Thinking in the quantitative realm, since that’s what we’ve been reading about recently in our text, I believe a survey would be the best way at getting at the data I want. I could have various groups of questions for the areas I previously described relating to teaching oral foreign language skills. Next, taking that data, I could aggregate the results of similar questions to gain insight into the major areas that interest me. Given that Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools does such a good job of making instructor email addresses available, administering my survey through email (whether I build it in a Word document or use a website such as SurveyMonkey) would probably make the most sense. Using a website may be even more convenient, because then the respondent wouldn’t have to worry about replying to me; they would just have to click the submit button on the final page of survey from the website. Of course, the survey would have to include some open-ended questions for participants to not only give general thoughts, but perhaps comment on an aspect I might have missed.
Still, for exploring the breadth of teaching strategies, doing in-depth interviews in combination with a survey (or in lieu of one) may yield more complete information in all the areas related to teaching oral foreign language skills, especially since my research question, as is, remains open-ended.
3 comments:
Greg, this is excellent progress. I think research on teaching methodology for oral language is excellent. You are correct that you could effectively use either survey or interview data collection. And you also might want to observe their classes.
And I am excited that you might use an online survey!!!!
Your topic sounds very interesting (as it is very similar to my own, I say that with some bias). You might consider starting to develop some questions that you could research during our lit reviews which would give you a better background for when you start conducting interviews (eg. what do linguists say are the most effective methods and why).
Also, I know that you are very interested in linguistics. Have you considered orienting your topic more towards an area directly related to linguistics (eg. How, if ever, do teachers use the basic principles of linguistics to teach oral proficiency?).
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