A handbook for Exploratory Action Research

Categories
A.  “When we’re stuck, I think use of 
Spanish can support”
[+Spanish as support]
[+Spanish as support]
B. “When our mother tongue is used, it’s 
better in terms of understanding”
[+Spanish as understanding]
[+Spanish as support]
C. “Using mother tongue reduces my 
interest in the lesson”
[–reduces interest]
[–reduces interest]
D. “If we don’t understand, speaking in 
Spanish is better”
[+Spanish as understanding] 
[+Spanish as support]
E. “When Spanish is used, the pace of the 
lesson may slow down”
[–slow lesson]
[–slow lesson]
F. “I feel relieved when I feel that I can 
understand”
[+Spanish as understanding] 
[+Spanish as support]
G. “After some time, when the language we 
know is used, we get bored easily”
[–boring]
[–reduces interest]
H. “I think we can learn faster with the 
target language”
[–better learning]
[–better learning]

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Extra material | 
105
Answer Key
Chapter 6 
Task 6.4
Perhaps the most obvious overall category to spot among 
these keywords is ‘preferences for different interaction 
patterns’ (including pairwork, groupwork and individual 
work), but this is hardly surprisingly, as this is what the 
teacher asked the students to write about! You may have 
spotted another important umbrella category emerging 
from this very small set of data: all five students talk about 
other students in some way (who they like, and don’t like
to work with, whether they work effectively with certain 
people, etc.). This is an interesting emerging theme, one 
that isn’t so obvious when you first look at the data.
Here’s one possible two-sentence summary. Notice how
the first sentence introduces the theme, and the second 
describes the finding:
An important part of pairwork and groupwork for these 
learners is who they work with. Their evaluations of 
which interaction pattern they preferred were often 
linked to how much they did or didn’t enjoy working with 
others, either in pairwork or groupwork, with several
of them mentioning preferring pairwork slightly more.
If you are writing this up as a finding from your research, 
you could then add a few quotes to illustrate the point you 
are making.