English Language Teaching in its Social Context

EVALUATION OF CLASSROOM INTERACTION 291such as one might expect to occur during grammar lessons, remember them, and afterwardslist them on the charts which would be distributed at the end of the recording.To investigate the learning opportunities fully, I exhaustively collected all classroomtextual materials including all visual and audio aids. I also took notes of what went on theblackboard to help account later for the claims of uptaken items.InterviewTo provide the study with corroborative data, it was felt necessary to interview the subjectstwice over the six-week period: once in the middle and once at the end of the data gathering.The idea was to give the researcher a further chance to probe the informants about thepossible reasons which made them claim the particular items they reported on their uptakecharts. The interview was also believed to allow learners to express other ideas they feltwere missing from their uptake charts. As the number of learners was rather small, allthirteen could be interviewed in about one hour, the same day, after the third lessonrecording. The subjects were individually asked to answer the researcher’s queries while theother learners were outside the room, waiting for their turn to be interviewed.The interview, conducted in French or in Arabic according to the learners’ wishes, wasan adaptive structured interview where respondents were free to give details on the fiveissues which were followed up with all learners during the interview session. The issuescould be summarised as follows:12345Clarifications (if necessary) of self-reported data on the charts distributed at the endof every observed lesson.Rationale for claiming those specific items on today’s uptake chart or, if possible, onthe uptake charts distributed at the end of the two previous observed lessons.Possibilities for the learners to extend their perceptions of those items.Reactions to the benefits or otherwise of completing the charts at the end of everytaped grammar lesson.Feelings about the researcher’s presence and the tape-recorder in the back of theclassroom during the lesson.The second question, about the reasons for claiming certain items instead of others,was found to be most problematic to the respondents as some remained evasive whle othersproduced overgeneralised statements as to what made them claim those items. They wereunable to tell the researcher the reasons which made any particular item outstanding intheir minds.The fact that many of them reacted as if the question was irrelevant or irrationaldiscouraged the researcher from interviewing a second time as this question was the focusof the interview.The respondents produced responses that were insufficiently precise to be interpretedin relation to what might account for their claims. Because I was observing the same groupfor the period of six weeks I could have trained the informants by asking perhaps moredetailed and specific questions about what most attracted their attention in classroomdiscourse. However, as I had never even conducted an interview before, I was afraid to putwords in the learners’ mouths. Moreover, being miles away from any professional consultant,I did not dare meddle with the procedure and run the risk of undermining the data gathering.The interview had to be given within the six observational weeks as the learners’ responseshad to relate to these precisely observed events.