A Dissertation by GRACE HUI-CHIN LIN Submitted to the Office of ...

All of the qualitative methodologies presented in this chapter were for
investigating the main research question: What are Taiwanese university students’
perceptions about learning five communication strategies?
Naturalistic Inquiry
This study was guided employing a naturalistic inquiry, which assisted the
researcher in collecting data from broader perspectives of Taiwanese university
English learners. According to Patton (1990), naturalistic inquiry made a study
non-manipulative, unobtrusive, and non-controlling. Additionally, it allowed a study
to save “openness to whatever emerges” (Patton, 1990, p. 40). No matter the themes
discovered is related to the previous study or not, all the concepts revealed would be
valued. Therefore, researchers using qualitative study would be able to neutrally and
accurately reveal students’ perceptions of learning.
A proponent of the naturalistic inquiry, Denzin (1971) argued that “the
naturalistic inquirer resists using methods that oversimplify the complexity of
everyday life” (p. 101). Also, qualitative researchers deployed a wide range of
interconnected methods, hoping always to get a better fix on the subject matter at
hand (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994). Hence, in order to explore more related issues of
communication strategies that had been discussed, or had not been discussed;
naturalistic inquiry was used in this study. The naturalistic inquiry would make this
study approach the multiple realities of the learners’ perceptions because it was
“necessarily open-ended and emergent, tied to and deriving from specific pieces of
what has been seen, heard, and recorded” (Emerson, 2004, p. 458).
The Rationalistic Design
In order to provide the most valuable report to the administrators or policy
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