Professional Practice I - Week 6 - Qualitative Data Collection Techniques

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 6 of the Professional Practice I of the BA in English Teaching at ULACIT term IIIC 2022. In today's class we will look at qualitative data collection techniques and continue your study of TBLT by considering different task types. 

Today's Goals:

• Review best practices regarding common qualitative data collection techniques.
• Create a sample interview protocol about your research project. 
• Analyze sample communicative task types and design one of your own.

Guiding Questions:

• What techniques can I use to collect qualitative data for my research project?
• What are the features of an effective observation and interview protocol?
• What are the features of a communicative task?

Warm Up: My Criteria

For our warm up activity you will propose your own criteria for a lazy rainy day, a great vacation, a perfect pizza, or any other non-academic product or experience. Be ready to share your essential criteria with the class. Consier the example below.

Now click the group link  and complete the task.

• Group Link: CLICK HERE

Task 1: Weekly Check-In

It's week six! What have you been up to since our last meeting?

• How were your site visits this week?
• Have you done any actual teaching, assisting, or planning yet?
• What can you say about your groups?
• What more have you thought about your research topic/problem? 
• What are your responsibilities for next week?

Task 2: Concept Review

Let's quickly review our topics from last week by discussing these questions:

• What are some reasons to do a literature review?

• What is the point of writing a theoretical framework (theoretical perspective)?

• Remember last week's warm up with the elephant picture? What was that about? How does that relate to concept of a theoretica framework?

• Group Link: CLICK HERE

Task 3: Sharing Your Early Research

Last week you were asked to carry out some initial research for the theoretical framework (theoretical perspective) of your project.

• Search Terms: What possible search terms did you identify from your title, topic, research questions, and a quick Google search?

• Findings: Which terms provided the most relevant results? Did these results get you to think of any other terms? Did you find any sources that might help you?

• Work of Others: Did you look at how other researchers constructed their theoretical frameworks? Were you able to get any additional search terms, theory ideas, or possible authors to search for from looking a theoretical frameworks and reference sections of any of the papers you read?

• Concerns: Do you think you are ready to continue your research for this section on your own? Do you still need help thinking of possible theories to explore?

Task 4: Qualitative Data Collection

This week we will talk about techniques for collecting data for qualitative research. However, since case studies combine data from several sources, you may find that quantitative data collection techniques are also needed. Click the group link below and follow your teacher's instructions.

• Group Link: CLICK HERE

• Sample Observation Protocol: CLICK HERE

• Sample Interview Protocol: CLICK HERE

• Let's Try It!: Let's try what he have been learning. Click the group link below to begin creating your interview protocol.

• Group Link: CLICK HERE

Teacher Development Workshop

TBLT - Task Design

Task 5: What's in a Task?

Last week you participated in a Building Blocks workshop on the topic of lesson planning using task based language teaching. Today we are going to go into more detail about the topic of tasks, how we can classify them, and see plenty of examples. 

Warm Up: Hell's Kitchen

Work with your partners to complete the task and assign the correct dishes to the customers. Don't make Gordon angry!

• Group Link: CLICK HERE

• How would you describe the activity you just completed?

• What did you have to do? 

• How did you interact?

• What language did you use?

• Last week you heard about Task Based Language Teaching but what do we mean by "task"?

• Definition: In regular life, a task is...
• Definition: In language teaching, a task is...

• What are the characteristics of a communicative task? Well, Scott Thornbury says there are six characteristics that all communicative activities should fullfill. Let's see if you can match them.

Click to View Full Sized Image.

Designing Communicative Tasks

• All communicative tasks involve a gap. There are three types of gaps and understanding this concept can help you when designing your own tasks.

• Information Gap: Students have access to different sets of information and must communicate to share their information in order to accomplish the task.
• Sample: Spot the Differences - CLICK HERE
• Practice: Schedule a Meeting - CLICK HERE

• Opinion Gap: Like the information gap task, in opinion gap activities students have access to different information but this time it is not information provided by the teacher. Instead, it is their own thoughts and opinions which they must share with their partners to negotiate some kind of agreement.
• Sample: Vehicle Differences - CLICK HERE
• Practice: Health Consultants - CLICK HERE

• Reasoning Gap: In a reasoning gap task there is a problem to be solved and students need to communicate with each other to share their ideas in order to find a solution.
• Sample: Chef's Activity - CLICK HERE
• Sample: Sport's Agent - CLICK HERE 

• Creative Tasks: A final category that combines elements of Opinion Gap and Reasoning Gap tasks is to give students the task of engaging in creative thinking. Here are some examples.
• Create a Product (Text/Media): Students create a story, dialogue, advertisement, image, etc. 
• Sample: CLICK HERE or CLICK HERE
• Improvisation: Students are given a scenario and must act in response to it.
• Sample: CLICK HERE

Your Turn!

Instructions: Now work with your partners to brainstorm a task that would work for one of the topics you taught this week or will be teaching soon.

• What is the topic?
• What language is involved?
• What are communicative scenarios in real life when this language is used?
• What kind of gap can we exploit?
• Does the task provide the 6 characteristics of communicative activities?
• Purposeful, Reciprocal, Negotiated Meaning, Unpredictable, Heterogeneous, Synchronous?