A handbook for Exploratory Action Research

A. “When we’re stuck, I think use of Spanish can support”
B. “When our mother tongue is used, it’s better in terms
of understanding”
C. “Using mother tongue reduces my interest in the lesson”
D. “If we don’t understand, speaking in Spanish is better”
E. “When Spanish is used, the pace of the lesson may
slow down”
F. “I feel relieved when I feel that I can understand”
G. “After some time, when the language we know is used, 
we get bored easily”
H. “I think we can learn faster with the target language”
You can make a table like the one below to help you 
organise the codes and make the categories from them.
Response
Code/Label
Categories
A.  “When we’re stuck, I think use of 
Spanish can support”
B. “When our mother tongue is used, it’s 
better in terms of understanding”
C. “Using mother tongue reduces my 
interest in the lesson”
D. “If we don’t understand, speaking in 
Spanish is better”
E. “When Spanish is used, the pace of the 
lesson may slow down”
F. “I feel relieved when I feel that I can 
understand”
G. “After some time, when the language we 
know is used, we get bored easily”
H. “I think we can learn faster with the 
target language”
So what?
How do these findings 
relate to my findings
from other sources?
What do I know about
this now that I didn’t
know before?
What do the findings
tell me about my research 
question(s)?

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| What do I find?
Don’t worry if your own answer is different in some respects 
– different people will code and summarise the same data 
using different words – so long as the main ideas are similar. 
If you have doubts about how to code or label some 
qualitative data, you can ask a critical friend to help you to 
provide a second opinion. It is always a good idea to try to 
compare your own way of coding with someone else’s. 
Commentary
In this section so far, you have seen one example of 
qualitative data and how to code and form categories from 
it; you have also completed one task where you were asked 
to code, categorise and interpret some responses. You 
have hopefully begun to gain a clear picture in your mind 
about the steps to follow when analysing qualitative data. 
Here is our summary of these steps: