Relevance of Knowledge of Second Language Acquisition:
METHODOLOGY
Instruments and Procedures
Data was collected at two sites in two phases. The first phase took place at a mid-western university in the US from August 2001 to December 2001. The researcher sat in as one of the students attending the SLA class in an MA TESOL program. The class met twice a week, and each class meeting lasted 75 minutes. Peiling was interviewed weekly after class meetings3. The instructor of this course was interviewed twice, once in the middle of the course and once at the end of the semester.
The second phase of the study took place in an elementary school in Taiwan from February 2002 to June 2002. Daily classroom observations and weekly interviews were conducted to understand how Peiling dealt with her knowledge of SLA in her EFL classrooms. Along with the daily classroom observations and weekly interviews, conversations were taped and transcribed, and field notes were taken.
Documents, such as the textbook for SLA, the course packet of relevant articles, e-mail correspondence between the researcher and participants, guidelines for reports, course handouts, and questions on the final exam sheet were collected for inspection and data analysis.
3 Only one meeting was scheduled in November in order to accommodate Peiling’s academic load.
