Trascription process

Image retrieved from Google images on October, 19, 2010

I finished trascribing last Monday and it took forever (four months). It was an arduos process in which I tried to be as accurate as possible to what students actually said. It is a pity that I did some transcriptions of students who either dropped out or entered the course and did not make the final analysis group since I consider that I wasted some precious time there especially during the vacation time. I also should have started transcribing at the very beginning of vacation time in order to start coding when we started the semester. I wish I would had know at the end of last semester what Burns (2010) stated about starting categorizing as soon as you collect the data and I did not suspect that transcribing took so long. I have that ugly feeling that tells me I will have to take another semester in order to finish my project.

Latest Decisions Made with my Teacher and Project Director

During the last tutorial I had with Valeriya we agreed along with my teacher Liubava to only take into account those students who took the three courses. That means I need to analyze the following students' conversations: Johana, Fabiola, Andres, Diana Salamanca and Claudia. Even though Juan Pablo was with me during the entire course, he did not make this group because he only did four recordings out of the eight ones (including pre and post test recordings. During the interventions he was either absent for various reasons (business trips basically or during the first intervention his microphone did not work). I also took into consideration the students who recorded at least six times including the two tests. The rest of them did not make the analysis group because they either dropped out before (Leina, Marcela, Adriana, Maritza, Michael and Javier) or the ones who came into the course later (Victoria, Gabriel, Mayi, Diana Rodriguez and Alejandra).

Analytical tools for my project

Image retrived from Google images on October, 2010

LIST OF ANALYTICAL TOOLS USED FOR MY ACTION RESEARCH PROJECT

The following are the tentative analytical tools I can use during my data analysis stage:

QUESTIONING

• Helps me probe

• Helps me develop provisional answers

• Helps me think outside the box

• Helps me become acquainted with the data

• Helps me observe frequency and patterns

• Helps me to synthesize, theorize, guide and provide direction


COMPARISONS

 • Helps me notice the obvious

• Helps me find relationships and differences

• Helps me categorize and to differentiate categories

• Helps me define incidents when they are not easy to detect

• Helps me clarify concepts and increase understanding

• Helps me theorize

• Helps me bring out properties and dimensions

• Helps me examine incidents one by one


WAVING THE RED FLAG

 • Helps me go beyond biases, assumptions and/or beliefs that affect the analysis

• Helps me wonder why things happen

• Helps me define just how often an incident occurs

• Helps me avoid becoming accepting with a partial truth


LOOKING AT LANGUAGE

 • Helps me see grammatical patterns especially in the accuracy of the simple past and past continuous tenses.

• Helps me realize why learners are committing the same errors over again during the implementation stage.



LOOKING FOR WORDS THAT INDICATE TIME

 • Helps me find out if they are becoming aware of the past time expressions in order to use the verbs in simple or continuous aspects in the past tense.


TIMELINES

 • Helps me detect the performance level of each student who participated throughout the entire process.



References

- Burns, A. (2010). Doing action research in English language teaching. New York: Routledge. pp. 107-140.

- Corbin, J. &Strauss, A. (2008). Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. Sage Publications, Inc, 3rd edition. pp.45-64.