sample item: ‘How often does your English teacher talk about life in an English speaking country?’
Cultural contact (5 items): use of the English-speaking media sample item: ‘How often do you read magazines in English?’
The final section of the instrument included questions regarding certain biographical data of the participants, such as age and gender. Open ended items were also included to reveal the first, second (and third) foreign languages participants studied, and the contexts of learning these foreign languages.
2003b). The purpose of this step was to get a general picture of the content and structure of the coursebooks, as well as the stated aims formulated by the coursebook writers.
The next step in the analysis, following Richard’s (2005) framework, intended to determine the proportion of three kinds of language practice found in most EFL coursebooks, namely mechanical practice, meaningful practice and communicative practice. The three types of practice were defined by Richards as follows (2005, p. 15):
mechanical practice: controlled activities that involve repetition and substitution drills, usually designed to practice the use of a particular grammar item
meaningful practice: activities in which language is still controlled and students are required to make meaningful choices when using the language
communicative practice: activities in which language is not predictable;
language use is more spontaneous, taking place within a real communicative context
These three kinds of language practice roughly cover the types of activities featured in communicative coursebooks. Each of the three types of practice was expected be included in the methodological arrangement of the textbooks, since students need to undergo a process of controlled practice, by first doing easy-guided mechanical activities, before finally being able to perform free language practice which includes communicative interactions. Therefore, if coursebooks intend to develop communicative competence, it is justifiable to presume that they contain a balanced proportion of activities belonging to the types of language practice described (Gómez-Rodriguez, 2010; Richards, 2005).
The final step of the analysis endeavoured to determine the proportion of the attention the components of communicative competence receive in the three coursebook series. With regard to each individual task, many activities had the potential to develop communicative competence, but only if used appropriately by the teacher.
Therefore, the components to be developed were listed in two categories, i.e.,
‘definitely’ and ‘potentially developing communicative competence’, as recommended by one of my course instructors, Dorottya Holló (September 28, 2010, personal communication).
Three representative units from each of the three EFL coursebooks were chosen to examine the three types of practice and the proportion of the components of communicative competence, as suggested by Gómez-Rodriguez (2010). Three units were selected as representative data for each textbook, since, as Gómez-Rodriguez highlighted, “all the units included in each book follow a model pattern, in other words, all the units include the same sections, approximately the same number of activities and the same types of practice based on a unit model that publishing houses often provide to designers and authors” (2010, p. 333). Accordingly, it was not necessary to take data from all the material, since the same pattern is repeated in all the units of the textbooks.
To ensure the legitimacy of this assumption, the proportions of the number of different types of practices were first calculated and compared within each of the three representative units before computing the final percentages.
Apart from the main student’s book, supplementary materials accompanying the series were also analysed. This included the workbook, the additional activities from the teacher’s book, and, in the case of the New Headway series, the teacher’s resource pack. Other supplementary materials, such as the accompanying DVD or e-learning
available at the schools, so if teachers intended to use them, they had to find alternative ways to obtain them (which the respondents of the interview study did not do). See Appendix F for a complete list of the evaluated materials.
4.6.2 Interview study
The interviews with the teacher participants were conducted in 2013 and 2014.
According to the selection criteria, the participants were non-native teachers of English, thus the interviews were conducted in Hungarian, their native language. During the interviews, however, the respondents often opted for using the English expressions for EFL teaching-related terms which had no proper Hungarian equivalent, such as
‘warmers’ or ‘brainstorming’. Quotes included in the dissertation were translated into English by the author.
The interviews were preceded by two classroom observation sessions, and the observation data was always analysed before the interviews, thus allowing the researcher to enquire about certain aspects of the observed lesson as relevant to the development of communicative competence. The average length of the interviews was around 50 minutes, with the longest one lasting over an hour.
All the interviews were digitally recorded with the consent of the teachers and transcribed verbatim, yielding 27,862-word data. The analysis of the transcribed interview data was built on the traditions of the constant comparative method proposed by Glaser and Strauss (1967) and Maykut and Morehouse (2001). This data analysis technique relies on the continuous comparison of the newly identified codes with the already established ones.
4.6.3 Questionnaire study
The process of data collection in the questionnaire study started with obtaining the official agreement of the headmasters of the selected secondary schools followed by the establishment of the date and time of data collection with the particular teachers.
The questionnaires were filled in during one 45-minute English class, and the collection of data was conducted by the teachers who had previously been instructed about the data collection procedure.
The questionnaire was administered to 212 students altogether. Each session was followed by computing the collected data, which were subsequently analysed using SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) 16.0. Since for more complex statistical analyses a minimum of 200 cases are necessary, 240 questionnaires were handed out in the first round, taking the probability of inadequate response rate into account (Dörnyei, 2007). Only 196 questionnaires were returned, furthermore, two had to be excluded from the analysis due to invalid responses. Consequently, additional questionnaires had to be distributed (20), out of which 16 were returned, thus obtaining enough cases (N=212) for the analyses.
The process of data analysis started with the establishment of the internal consistency estimates of reliability, i.e., Cronbach α-s, for the scales. Then, data was submitted to principal component analysis to examine whether the scales indeed cover one distinct dimension of the construct. This step was followed by calculating descriptive statistical measures, such as the mean values and standard deviation, for each scale. Finally, significant correlations were sought between the scales to reveal underlying connections between the components of communicative competence and the