Follow-up interviews

annotated in a short list (cf Appendix 2-3). However, the researcher was not constrained by the list because this was new territory and the answers could have gone in any direction. In this way the researcher employed the instrument in a flexible way, free to ask unplanned questions and to pick up on unexpected issues whenever it was considered relevant or necessary in the course of the conversation. The interview was structured in five sections¹⁰²: I – Warm-up, questions on the current personal professional situation (how many hours they

work per week, what kind of position they have, their teaching experience in years)

II – Questions about their experiences in teacher training (training they had before beginning language teaching, current professional development support available, perceived need of training)

III – KommUNIkation Workshops (reasons for attending them, expectations, evaluation of the learning benefit)

IV – Teacher Development (what goals they have regarding their professional development, what they find useful for their professional development, how they think that teacher training may influence their development)

V – Teaching (factors that effect changes in their teaching, perceived development in teaching, how they see their role as language teachers, the most rewarding aspect of teaching for them).

Although the questions followed the areas of interest defined previously, they were used flexibly according to unexpected issues raised by the participants themselves.

3. Finally, pragmatic reasons affected the sampling procedure too. A plurilingual approach was deemed pertinent, with respect to which language should be used for the interviews.

Many reasons affected this choice: the wide range of L1 of the participants (including the teachers and the researcher) required a flexible approach, based on them feeling comfortable, i.e. the effort to maintain a pleasant situation for the participants¹⁰³. For example, some of the interviews were conducted in English for pragmatic reasons: for the majority of the teachers, German is a foreign language, with different degrees of proficiency; moreover, to avoid misunderstandings and to have a common platform for communication, English was

102 Cf. Appendix 2.

103 That participants feel comfortable is an important criterion in qualitative research. Mackey & Gass (2005:

174-175) make this qualification explicit under their "caveats" when interviewing. In line with this, Flick (2009: 170-173) considers some key points to "create a good atmosphere" during the interview and to ensure it, such as avoiding bureaucraticity or rigidity, showing sensitivity to the concrete course of the interview and the interviewees.

considered a good resource, as it is currently established as a Lingua Franca¹⁰⁴. However, the teachers were still asked beforehand how comfortable they were in answering in English.

When they were unsure, the interviews were conducted in a mixed mode: the questions were in English, but they answered in German (in one case Italian), in one case the questions and the answers were only in German. A further reason to adopt such a flexible approach derives from the fact that the concern of the research project is not the linguistic competence of the teachers but to uncover their meanings with respect to their own professional development.

The questions were for the most part open-ended, and the researcher took some short notes, while audio-recording the answers. For two items (referring to which activities they thought useful and easy /difficult), a number of options were anticipated on a sheet of paper, but where a list of options was given, a blank space for free answers was always left, so that the participants had the possibility of adding something that was not in the list of options provided. The need to anticipate some answers (in tick-off boxes) originated in the pilot interviews, due to the fact that the answers to these open-ended questions required a long time for the teachers to come up with ideas and were taking too much time (one pilot interview lasted more than 90 min. and the questionnaire used at the time had only half of the questions compared to the final version).

The answers in the interview required ‘delayed’ retrospection (recalling mentally thoughts or facts related to their past teacher training/development experiences) and introspection, defined by Nunan & Bailey (2009: 285) as the “process of observing and reporting on one’s own thoughts, feelings, motives, reasoning processes, and mental states”. Both can be seen as forms of self-report, which is controversial, as some operations “may not be available for introspection” (Nunan & Bailey 2009: 300) and also because they may depend on the verbalisation competence of the participants. Some of the teachers in fact did not seem accustomed to this kind of reasoning and might have had additional difficulties in verbalising introspection.

Validation of the interview guide

In order to get accustomed to the interview method, some pilot interviews (= 5)¹⁰⁵ were conducted with diverse colleagues from different school types, who had not taken part in the program. They served to learn how to narrow the focus and to increase the “situational competence”, that, according to Flick (2009: 154), is fundamental to successfully carrying out

104 This is the term currently used to as a means of communication in English between speakers with different first languages (Seidlhofer 2005).

105 The Appendices 2 and 3 contain all the versions of the guidelines, including the final version.

interviews.

A pilot interview with one participant of the program made it clear that there were not enough questions, and that I had to add and to structure the questions more clearly. The interview questions also changed through discussion in the PhD seminar.

Conducting the interviews

All interviews were conducted by the researcher. The participants were asked which place was most convenient for them. The majority (6 out of 10) chose my office (which turned out to be the best option in terms of lack of noise or interruptions), three preferred me to visit them at their home and the one remaining asked me to go to her office (this proved to have some disadvantages, because we were interrupted several times).

The positive attitudes of the participants, made the whole interview setting very easy for the researcher. This was a clear benefit and also contributed to limiting a certain unavoidable nervousness. The task of managing the “interpersonal drama” (de Sola Pool 1957 quoted in Hermann 2008: 361) and of being focused, open and attentive during the interview was thus clearly relieved by the pleasant athmosphere that the participants always contributed to. In addition, because they knew the researcher already, they could talk freely without feeling they were talking to a stranger.

The course of the interview was characterised by a briefing phase, with explanations about the purpose of the interview, the topics around which the questions revolved and the use of the audio-recorder. They had previously received all this information on the phone when being contacted by the researcher who asked them to participate in the interviews. On that occasion they had already heard about being audio-recorded and had given their consent. A couple of them expressed their concern about not being able to remember much about the Programme KomUNIkation, but they were reassured that this was not the goal of the interview. Instead, it was considered very important to emphasise that their own opinions and views about teacher professional development were central in the study, and that, as such, there were no right or wrong answers. They were obviously relieved by this.

The warm-up contributed very much to maintaining an atmosphere free from anxiety for the rest of the interview. The teachers were asked to describe their current job situation, to express their general expectations about language teacher development programmes or teacher training in general. From that they proceeded to elaborate on their opinions about the benefits they felt they had from KommUNIkation and on their development over time.

At the end of the interview a short debriefing (Kvale & Brinkmann 2009: 129) followed, in which the participants were asked whether they wished to add anything (only three accepted

this invitation, probably because the interviews were quite extensive).

The duration of the interviews amounted on average to about 90 minutes. The first pilot interview with teacher A54 took one hour and a half, but the interview guideline was at that time only a draft. She was contacted a second time¹⁰⁶, which took another one and a half hours. In her case the interview took three hours.

All interviews had a positive course, were pleasant and were characterized by a very friendly attitude towards the researcher and the questions (in one case a teacher took a very long time to answer all the questions and in another case another teacher did not seem as relaxed as the others, but in both cases their openness and willingness was manifest). In all cases their seriousness, their openness and desire to express themselves freely and honestly were impressive.

Post-interview script

After the interview was conducted, relevant information was annotated for each interview, regarding place, time and duration of the interview, comments about any incidents and impressions about their willingness, openness and attitude and about the global atmosphere.

After having described the methods, the following section offers a documentation of some aspects of the process of data analysis for this study.