Essay Example on Each teacher was assured about the issues of Anonymity

Before the start of each interview each teacher was assured about the issues of anonymity and confidentiality The researcher confirmed that they would not be identified in names and the information from them would be kept confidential during and after the interview For this codes were used as T1 T2 T3 and T4 instead of their names and they were informed of this and the code given to each interviewee Thus T1 T2 T3 and T4 refer to the first the second the third and the fourth teacher interviewed respectively The same was true for teachers in the group interview that random codes were given as T1 T2 and T3 Because using audio recording requires permission from teachers before the start of each interview each teacher was again requested for permission whether or not to use audio recording Fortunately all were willing for this Thus the questions and responses of interviews were recorded using audio recorder This was done so from the view that taking notes may have problems with the quality of the data and the activity itself may distract the researcher s and respondents attentions McDonough McDonough 1997 whereas audio recording is useful to maintain accuracy of information have objective analysis at later time and preserve respondents emotions and tone of voice Best Kahn 2006 In each interview the researcher attempted to guide stimulate and facilitate the discussion through probing seeking for further clarifications 

One important point to mention in connection to the conduct of teachers interviews was that the researcher made attempts to approach each interviewee teacher in variety of ways and contexts in the university like having informal discussions about social and professional issues in the cafeteria in their offices in bus services and so on before each interview so that they would develop sense of proximity and feel at ease during interviews The interviews for the head and the dean were conducted in their respective offices on the agreed date and time These interviews were conducted after the one to one and the group interviews had been finalized As a final step the information from each interview was transcribed into texts based on themes initially devised during schedule development resulting in word based qualitative data Then thematic organization qualitative analysis and interpretation were done on the information as presented in Chapter Four See Appendices VI VII VIII and IX for the one to one group head and dean interview transcripts respectively When it comes to classroom observations they were conducted to cross check and access live information about teachers actual classroom instruction and the physical nature of classrooms in which they were teaching In the conduct of each observation there were specific procedures which were followed 

One was asking for permission and selecting willing teachers whose classrooms were to be observed In this regard a total of four teachers who were willing for this purpose were selected These teachers were not requested for and did not participate in any of the interviews conducted This was done intentionally so as to have information from each teacher through the use of different tools at least using two tools The second one was deciding the time the frequency and the duration of the observation process Decision about these was made with each teacher to be observed ahead of the observation process In this regard the time period for observation for each teacher was settled based on each teacher s weekly schedule For this the researcher requested for each observee teacher's schedule from the department and had it in print form to ease the observation process Regarding the frequency of observation it was conducted three times for each teacher This was done in an attempt to be objective and have valid and reliable information from each teacher's classroom observation and from the observation in general As regards to the duration of observation each observation was conducted in each teacher s full instructional period whose duration was 50 minutes It is important to make clear that though there were different programmes run by the department the focus of this study was only on the regular undergraduate programme Therefore all classroom observations were conducted on the English language instructional processes of the regular undergraduate programme The third one was that during the process each checklist was coded as OT1 OT2 OT3 and OT4 to maintain anonymity of information and each code with ordinals 1st 2nd and 3rd to indicate the frequency of observation for each teacher This anonymity was informed to each teacher during the selection process 

The fourth one was entering observational data into the schedule Because there are different ways of entering observational data into a structured schedule in this study rating scale method of entering was used observing judging and entering into the rating scale Cohen et al 2011 Hence each item was rated by ticking the appropriate category Never Rarely Undecided Sometimes Frequently to rate the behaviour presented in each item and enter the data into the schedule A five point rating scale was used for the reason that it would show the extent of presence or absence of each behaviour to be observed than a smaller rating scale like a Yes No rating would do so The rating scale was preferred from the researcher s belief that it would show the extent to which each activity happened in the classroom Besides this unintended teaching behaviours but observed in teachers actual teaching were noted down in open ended forms on the schedule under the item Any other behaviour Moreover the nature of the physical feature of each classroom wherein observations were conducted was noted down in open ended forms See Appendix V