A handbook for Exploratory Action Research

5. What kinds of activities do you like or would you 
like to do in English classes? 
Most of the answers to this question were focused on 
doing more practical, funnier and group activities in 
classes. In order of preference: songs, games, karaoke, 
movies, oral exercises, acting, puzzles and jigsaws, 
pictionary, group contests, spelling, debates and 
repeating and learning words’ pronunciation. Apart from 
that, some students proposed more hours of English 
classes and an English workshop after school.

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| What do I find?
6.2 Analysing and interpreting qualitative data
Analysing quantitative data basically involves counting (see 6.1 above and 6.3 below). Analysing qualitative data, on the 
other hand, tends to involve coding – that is, labelling ideas so that you can easily group similar ideas together.
For example, consider the following four students’ written responses to the question ‘How do you feel about group work?’
A. I like that we practise
B. I like being relaxed
C. I like speaking English
D. I like English conversation with no worry
Even though these responses are all different, using different words, there are some underlying similarities.
These similarities can become clearer if you give a label, also known as a ‘keyword’ or ‘code’, to each separate idea. 
Notice that you can give more than one code to a single statement, as in the case of (D) above. Also, your codes don’t need 
to be single words – two or more words can be used, as in ‘speaking English’. If you want, you can use symbols like ‘+’ for 
‘like’ or ‘-’ for dislike. However, the actual codes and symbols you use are for you to invent, to correspond with what you 
read in the data. There are no fixed codes or symbols that ‘must’ be used.
If you now look again at the Code/Label column above, you can probably identify some similarities. If you think about 
students’ enjoyment of practising the language by speaking, then you can say that they like to ‘use’ the language. Also, 
being ‘relaxed’ and having ‘no worry’ seem to belong together – you can say that this is also a common idea. Here, then, is 
where you can put ideas together under bigger labels, which are called ‘categories’ (see table below). These are basically 
‘bigger codes’ because they include codes that were similar to one another and therefore have been put together.
We can summarise this analysis by saying that three of this small set of students like group work because it enables them 
to use, or practise, English, while two of the four students like the fact that group work helps them feel relaxed. 
We have now seen how this small set of data can be analysed. The results, as just presented, constitute the teacher’s 
‘findings’: 
However, findings don’t just ‘speak for themselves’. Something more is necessary, and that is to interpret the findings.