English Language Learners

1457 Words3 Pages

Participants

Participants involved in providing educational services for ELLs were electronically invited to participate in the study. Phone interviews were conducted with 5 school-based employees. To be included in the study participants had to meet the following criteria: (a) employed by a school that offers services to children who are learning English as a second language, (b) worked in a school setting for a minimum of 5 years, (c) provided education services or made educational placement decisions for students who were identified as English Language Learners for a minimum of 5 years, and (d) be a proficient English speaker. Relevant personnel included English as a second language (ESL) teachers, ESL supervisors, and ESL program directions. …show more content…

Also referred to as a standardized open interview (Patton, 1990, 2014; Durdella, 2018), the open-set of interview questions were used to analyze and compare responses across participants. Durdella (2018) suggests the standardized open interview protocol include the following: (a) consent; (c) interview; and (d) post-interview. The current study followed the above-mentioned format during the interview process to encourage participants to disclose unrestricted responses and highlight features of their perspectives (Stake, 1995) . This study allowed the inclusion of a wider range of participants, with greater anonymity, and less intimidation to allow the participant to speak freely and at length about their opinions and experiences (Burke & Miller, 2001; Chapple, 1999). This method of data collecting has been utilized for multiple disciplines, such as education, health care, psychology, and speech-language pathology (Coon, Pena, & Illich, 1997; Gibson, 1994; Smith, 2005; Spurgeon, Clarke, & Sackley, 2015). This study utilized a phone interview approach to allow the investigators to examine multiple perspectives across participants including participants geographically distant populations with variable schedules (Block & Erskine, …show more content…

Codes can be characterized by words or short phrases that represent or capture particular elements of the data collected (Saldana, 2013). The use of coding supports the identification of common and uncommon perspectives reported by the participants (Theron, 2015). Charmaz (2006) emphasizes the benefits of implementing a coding system, which allows a researcher to examine the meaning of the data collected while creating links between similarities and differences in responses. These links are developed as repeated codes appear, which may be an indicator for themes or patterns that transpire during the coding process (Theron, 2015). In qualitative research, to gather the underlying meaning of that data, recurring codes generate in the development of categories or concepts to form interpretations of commonalities (Saldana 2013). In the current study, the coding process was divided into two steps: (1) initial coding of interview transcripts, and (2) a response analysis for all coded interview excerpts. To create code names and definitions, the first author read through two interview transcripts and then designated a word or a phrase that represented the idea that the participant discussed during a particular response. Then the authors reviewed the words and phrases to generate code names and operational definitions for each code. Code names and their definitions were

Open Document