What do I find? | 57 As we see below, Daniela had some further useful
questions on her questionnaire, of another kind;
1. How do you feel at the moment of speaking English?
2. What kinds of activities do you like or would you like
to do in English classes?
These two questions are typical ‘qualitative questions’.
Such questions are often open questions, with a wide range
of answers which (as in this case) can help us to understand
what people are thinking or feeling. They give a voice to the
participants in our research.
These two questions, then, gathered what is called
qualitative data, involving descriptions of feelings, opinions,
impressions, qualities, etc. Notice how Daniela needed to
ask these questions in order to understand the causes of
the problem she had observed. ‘How…?’ and ‘Why…?’ are
perhaps the two most common qualitative questions.
Qualitative data, unlike quantitative data, visually presents
itself as responses, short or longer sentences or even
paragraphs.
Task 6.2 Read about Daniela’s further findings below and then
answer questions D and E that follow:
D. What additional information did Daniela get by asking
the above two questions?
E. Why was this useful?
4. How do you feel at the moment of speaking English? Group A (15 students) feel comfortable, relaxed and fine
when they speak English in class. They feel that
performing oral activities in classes will help them to
develop accurate speaking skills.
Group B (23 students) feel nervous, insecure, and not
confident because they do not have a proper or
accurate command of the language. Most of them said
they get nervous, lack confidence and feel embarrassed
when speaking because they are afraid of making
mistakes, and hearing their classmates laugh at their
errors. Among the answers, a few students said that
when they know the correct answers, they feel great, but
when the answers are wrong they feel frustrated. Finally,
only one of them said he does not like oral quizzes or
tests because he is not sure about his pronunciation.
