This chapter aims to provide an overview of the research project and the methods used in the three studies by presenting the research design and the instruments, explaining and justifying the decisions taken during the investigation, evaluating the research processes and commenting on its limitations.
In order to seek answers to the research questions, three studies were conducted. In Study One, learners' comprehension and attitudes towards English speech varieties were investigated by means of a general questionnaire, a comprehension task featuring three speech varieties of English, each of which was followed by an attitude questionnaire about the given variety. Study Two involved an interview study with a think aloud protocol in order to gain a more profound insight into the issues under investigation. Study Three included a second comprehension test with an attitude questionnaire, which was essentially the replication of Study One, with conceptual and methodological refinements based on the two previous studies. Study Three included adding constructs emerging from the interviews in Study Two, making improvements in the methodology based on the results of the questionnaire in Study One as well as the insights gained from the interviews of Study Two and analysing different aspects of the data.
As can be seen from the outline of the research design above, the investigation presented combined qualitative and quantitative methods, which can be regarded as a mixed methods approach to research. The intention behind this was to take a pragmatic approach in order to
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study learners' comprehension of English speech varieties and their attitude towards them in all its complexity, aiming to reveal tendencies on a larger population but, at the same time, allowing the research to be shaped by insights emerging from individual learners. Therefore, mixed methods research did not only pertain to the instruments and the type of data gained from them, but also the epistemological stance of the investigation. This means that the present research cannot be considered as either purely deductive and theory driven, or entirely inductive and exploratory, but it is a mixture of these two approaches (c.f. Dörnyei, 2007). For instance, the constructs of the questionnaire of Study One were based on theories drawn from the literature, while the one in Study Three phase also included constructs emerging from the interview data of Study Two.
In this way, the main aim of the investigation was not to prove or disprove a hypothesis or hypotheses, but to adopt an exploratory approach. Nevertheless, the research project also sought to investigate how theories, such as the theoretical framework of ELF, could be applied to the Hungarian context. For example, the investigation intended to reveal the extent to which theories such as the Lingua Franca Core (Jenkins, 2000), the model of the three circles of English speakers (Kachru, 1992) or issues of native speakerism (Holliday, 2005) could be applicable to the context or contexts of ELT in Hungary. However, despite the predominantly quantitative methodology used in the research, there were no solid a priori hypotheses regarding how much learners would understand various accents of English or what attitudes they might have towards them.
It is assumed that reality, and as such, comprehension skills and attitudes, are complex and fluid phenomena, which are prone to vary from context to context and change over time,
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which does not allow broad generalizations regardless of the methods used, the nature of the data or the type or size of the sample. As Dörnyei (2007) notes it:
Most data collected in the social sciences, regardless of whether it is QUAL or QUAN, is related to people – what they do, what they are like, what they think or believe in, what they plan to do, etc. Because people differ from each other in the way they perceive, interpret or remember things, their accounts will show considerable variation across individuals [...] we have to face the fact that the final picture unfolding in our research will always be a function of whom we select to obtain our data from. (Dörnyei, 2007, p.27)
Therefore, the goal of the present research can be seen as revealing tendencies and informing language pedagogy by providing insights into the comprehension of and attitude towards English speech varieties so that can teachers can make use of the findings at their discretion, making their own judgements as to what may apply to their learners and their particular teaching context (Widdowson, 2003).
The research design was evolving in nature, which means that findings of the previous studies fed into and shaped subsequent studies. For this reason, the following sections present the three studies separately by describing the methods, instruments and procedures followed by the results of the three studies respectively. The following table provides a visual overview of the research process, including the instruments of the three studies and how they contributed to answering the research questions. The research questions are repeated below for the reader‟s convenience in order to show how they relate to the three studies of the research project according to the table.
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Table 1. Overview of the three studies of the research project
Phase Instrument Data type
QUALitative or QUANtitative
Relevance for
research question (RQ)
Phase One
General questionnaire QUAN: questionnaire data RQ2 & RQ4 Comprehension tasks QUAN: comprehension test
scores
RQ1 Follow-up
questionnaire after comprehension tasks
QUAN: questionnaire data;
QUAL: comments on speech varieties
RQ2 & RQ4
Phase Two
Semi-structured interview
QUAL: interview data RQ2 & RQ4
Think-aloud protocol QUAL: interview data RQ1 & RQ2 Phase
Three
General questionnaire QUAN: questionnaire data RQ2 & RQ4 Comprehension tasks QUAN: comprehension test
scores
RQ1 Follow-up
questionnaire after comprehension tasks
QUAN: questionnaire data;
QUAL: comments on speech varieties
RQ2 & RQ4
RQ1: How successful are Hungarian EFL learners in comprehending speech varieties of English?
RQ2: What factors influence Hungarian EFL learners‟ success in comprehending speech varieties of English?
RQ3: What attitudes do Hungarian EFL learners have towards speech varieties of English?
RQ4: What factors influence Hungarian EFL learners‟ attitudes towards speech varieties of English?
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