Making the research project public

The introduction of a research perspective in my daily teaching job has enhanced the possibility of exploring the relationship between research and teaching and now,it represents a good opportunity to share my reflections about teaching and learning processes.
The research project developed with some deaf students at U.P.N. has encouraged me to continue working to determine the viability of the course and the strategies chosen to help them to establish a different relationship with English knowledge. Although this is just the beginning of a long research process and probably, many mistakes will be done, sharing the research project with other teachers and experts is important to identify strenghts and failures. Their feedback will determine the effectiveness of the following research steps like doing a second or even third Action Research cycle.
Today, I have received a mail accepting the project to be shared in a research colloquium. I am really happy.

See more details at

http://www.humanas.unal.edu.co/img/Lenguas%20Extranjeras/actas/Coloquiomayo27a29iuamarzo12.pdf

Making sense of the collected data

Triangulation image taken from http://www.watershedplanning.illinois.edu/profile_steps/step3.cfm

Having collected and categorized the data, the next step was to analyze the pieces of information gathered and connect them with these research questions.

• What is the effect of using Internet resources as a support on the development of a blended English course designed for deaf university students?

• What does the use Internet resources in a blended English course tell us about the language learning process of deaf university students?

• What insights about collaborative learning can be identified in an English course for deaf students?

The triangulation process.

Sagor (1993) defines the term triangulation as “the use of multiple independent data sources to corroborate findings”. For me, triangulation is a strategy to analyze the data gathered by the instruments since different perspectives in order to get different arguments that support the initial answers given to the research questions.

The different instruments enabled me to answer the following questions.

1. What did I see? direct observation, video recorded class.

2.. What did the deaf students tell me? surveys and the final interview

3. What did students " demonstate" ? students' artifacts, my logs and video recorded classes.

Trying to “manage” all the information gathered from the different instruments can be difficult for novice researchers like me. For example, I made a mistake because in the data analysis report, I described the data gathered by each instrument separately; in other words, without connecting them with the other instruments. After receiving the tutors’ feedback, I understood that it was necessary to “knit” all the ideas in a coherent and fluent way.

Although comparing and contrasting results was a long and hard process, it enabled me to identify useful data gathered from similar patterns from different sources which supported the work and increased my confidence towards the research study. It also helped to identify different patterns immersed in the project’s development. For instance, After watching the recorded interview several times to analyze the pieces of data and identify which ones could support the preliminary results given by the surveys and the students’ artifacts, I found “new” information that seemed “tacit” in the students’ discourse and it is quite useful to my research purposes, particularly, for the second cycle of this research study.

Thus, triangulation increases the validity and reliability of the collected data, improves the confidence of the researcher and provides a real” panorama” of the studied problem. In addition, it reveals other findings which are useful for a further study.

Reference Sagor R. ( 1999) How to conduct collaboative action research.Alexandria. VA, U.S.A.

Content theory to analyze data

Image taken from http://all-sorts.biz/

During the pedagogical implementation done with deaf students, they produced different pieces of written texts to “demonstrate” their learning process. As I had to analyze them in order to identify information trends and patterns which were useful to find possible answers to the research questions, I found Content Analysis technique appropriate to do this examination.

According to Krippendorff (2004 p.18) “Content Analysis is a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts (or other meaningful matter) to the contexts of their use”.

The following reasons support the choice of Content Theory to analyze the data.

1. It makes emphasis on meaning rather on quantification and helped me to build an interpretation of key data sources like gestures and non verbal communication details which are important aspects to analyze in the work with deaf participants.

2. Not only the written texts obtained with the students’ artifacts were analyzed with this technique, the recorded interview, my logs including the classroom observations and two written surveys were also useful to do the data analysis.

3. Content Analysis theory enabled me to make some inferences about the language acquisition process of deaf university students. In addition, the data obtained was analyzed in several levels taking into account the context, the natural occurrence of language and even the human interaction of deaf participants.

Reference

Krippendorff, K. ( 2004 p.18) Content Analysis: An introduction to its methodology.Sage Publications. London, U.K.