Awareness Demonstrated by Medical Students
5. Data
5.1 Collection instruments
A significant aspect of ethnographical research is to make use of multiple data sets (Dörnyei 2007) in order to incorporate various viewpoints and a variety of data sets have been collected for the MoM-SA project. For the purpose of this study specific data relevant to the question (What metacognitive awareness about tasks do medical communication students demonstrate?) have been selected, including the following:
1. Pre-course questionnaire with Likert scale and open questions on the languages students speak, how confident they feel using these as well as the frequency hereof and what they think would be the best way to learn a new language 2. Usability study following a Logic Framework (Van De Poel/Fourie 2013) apart
from answering a set of matrix questions, students also had the opportunity to provide structured narrative comments on their learning experiences
3. Post-course questionnaire that included an open question that required 2014-students to evaluate the use of Facebook as part of the course
4. Recorded and transcribed post course focus group discussion on students’
transition from school to university; whether they think it is necessary to speak
a language other than English in a professional medical environment and how they think a new language should be learned (2014-students)
5. Entries/posts on closed Facebook group (2014-students)
6. Pre-course questionnaire on availability of and access to computers and inter- net (2014-students)
5.2 Data collection
The questionnaires were completed individually on paper during the first and final lesson, as well as during an evaluation session that took place after the final lesson. The focus group interviews were also conducted and recorded during this final evaluation session. The text (all posts) of the online Facebook group was copied and saved.
5.3 Data handling procedure
All the data collected as text were analysed according to the principles of grounded theory. The strategies grounded theorists use include amongst others the view- point that data collection and data analysis can occur simultaneously and influ- ence each other, which puts the focus on the analysis of actions and processes rather than on pre-conceived themes and structure to support theory construc- tion. The systematic analysis of narrative data is therefore important in the process of developing new conceptual categories as well as inductive abstract categories (Charmaz 2014).
In general, three phases of coding can be distinguished (Dörnyei 2007).
Through the process of several readings the text is first broken into chunks (open coding). This initial coding process is descriptive and relates strongly to the data and not on preconceived hypotheses (Charmaz 2014). Then more abstract con- nections are made to resemble concepts and subcategories (theoretical coding) and finally a core category (or categories) are identified that becomes a/the focal point of the research (selective coding). By using this process grounded theorists aim to code the meaning suggested by the data (Charmaz 2014).
The data directly related to and focusing on the closed Facebook was also ana- lysed according to grounded theory at an earlier stage and reported upon (Fourie 2015). The outcome of this analysis was also taken into account as an integral constituent of the current research (see Appendix 1).
5.4 Data handling
The answers to the questionnaires were submitted to Survey Monkey Gold (www.
surveymonkey.net) as separate sets of data. The focus group interviews were tran- scribed and submitted to Survey Monkey Gold as another set of data.
In Survey Monkey Gold the following open questions with students’ comments were selected and exported to Excel:
7. What I liked about the method (structure and content of the course) 8. What I would like to see changed about the method
9. What I liked about the lessons
10. What I would like to see changed about the lessons
11. What I liked about the approach (the teaching, the books and online materials)
12. What I especially liked about the grammar book 13. What I especially liked about the general course book 14. What I liked about MoM online
15. I will/won’t recommend MoM for Medical Students to other medical students, because
16. I will/won’t use MoM online again, because 17. How do you think one learns a new language 18. General comments
19. My recommendations for this course
20. Have their been instances where you did not understand what the other per- son was saying here on campus or where someone did not understand what you were saying?
Through a process of several readings, these comments were tagged according to general task features valued in students’ communication learning process. Repeated keywords, opinions and experiences that referred to the same idea were used as labels to tag the data. Documenting these carefully, the data were exported to Mi- crosoft Word and were grouped together under sub-concepts, according to abstract connections. After more readings and also by organizing the information in tables, several core categories regarding students’ awareness about tasks were identified.
These subcategories were again organized to reflect core categories such as structure, well-being of students, types of activities, linguistic content of tasks, timing and pace of learning as well as the nature (inherent characteristics) of tasks. For the purposes of this research, the nature of the tasks as a category was explored in more detailed as this category provides the guiding characteristics or principles underlying the other categories.