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

conventionalized method recommended by Rababah (2002). All of the discussion
topics for practicing using the five communication strategies were everyday life
topics downloaded from an English conversation learning website (The Internet
Journal, 2005).
Instruments of Interviews
The instruments of interviews in this study were open-ended questions and a
video camera. That is, the method of videotaping interviews through open-ended
questions was applied in this study. A list of open-ended questions focusing on the
Taiwanese university learners’ perceptions of learning five communication strategies
in Faerch and Kasper’s (1983c) taxonomy had been used in the videotaped interviews.
The broad questions were more credible for eliciting the students’ perceptions
because they would not mislead the students’ statements of perceptions but made the
learners formulate their reflections of learning on their own (Schuman & Presser,
1996).
Second, the video camera was used in order to make the data trustworthy and
reliable. Videotaping as an interview instrument made the data conformability
checkable by the fieldworkers (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). The reason it would be
checkable was that not a detail would be lost if the whole interview process was
taped. In other words, the interview questions were more flexible, so that seven
students’ perceptions in multi-patterns could be elicited more naturalistically. Besides,
the videotaped data would be trustworthy because the field-workers would be able to
access the data and check the conformability between the collected qualitative data in
the tape and the written findings in the report whenever the researchers needed to do
this.
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