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

as the finding results.
10) The member checks were conducted, for the second time and the third
time, three months and four months after the second interview.
Interview in an Honest Atmosphere
The data were collected in an isolated conversation coffee room provided by
the Department of Foreign Language and Literature at Tunghai University. Through
cooperating with 7 volunteers from different departments in the Agriculture College,
the researcher purposed to conceptualize the 7 Taiwanese university EFL learners’
perceptions in learning. In order to retrieve the students’ honest answers, the trainer
and the researchers helped the students to learn strategies in a free and relaxing
atmosphere, where the students were not forced or encouraged to use the strategies.
Also, in the interviews, the students were allowed to give any types of comments on
the learned skills instead of always giving positive feedbacks.
Ninety-Minute Interviews after 5 and 10 Weeks of Training
The researcher anticipated that the seven learners would recall and express
their experiences of learning. According to Lincoln & Guba (1985), the goal of the
qualitative data collection was to gain information from the populations regarding the
research questions while applying them to the potential research issues under
consideration. Therefore, in the interviews, the researcher listened to the students’
statements that were concerned or unconcerned in the previous studies of
communication strategies. In other words, this study investigated whether the
students’ statements contained potential research issues that rarely had been
perceived in the communication strategy field.
In this study, each interview lasted for 90 minutes. According to Seidman
47