Category Archives: Research

Researching English for Academic Purposes

Dedoose

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I discovered Dedoose recently when one of the MA students I was supervising used it.

Dedoose is a cross-platform cloud-based application from UCLA  for analysing qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods research data that includes text, photos, audio, videos, spreadsheet data and more.

Overall, Dedoose is user-friendly. It offers a user-friendly interface, which includes a clear overview of your recent activities on the front page. It also includes a detailed user guide on their website and a demo project – a mixed methods study of literacy development – which will help you to explore Dedoose and see what it can do.

One advantage of Dedoose is the ease with which it allows data to be imported and the wide range of formats the software supports. For that reason, it is easy to import large amounts of text, numbers and pictures.

It is often the case that with qualitative data, when coding large amounts of text, it can be difficult to keep track of the codes assigned to different parts of the text. Dedoose allows the researcher to create a description of each code they have created, which makes the codes easy to track. It is also easy to clearly organise codes into parent, child and grandchild codes, according to their importance. They can then be moved up or down as many times as necessary. Dedoose also offers the option to delete a code if it is not found to be useful.

However, as with all qualitative data analysis, coding individual sections of text takes time and requires a large amount of work. Dedoose does, though, help to ease the pressure on the coding with, for example, the quick code widget.

Dedoose can also work to a limited extent with quantitative data. It is quite easy to import spreadsheet data from a survey, for example. Dedoose can understand numerical data, multiple choice data, Likert scale data etc and the data can easily be edited when it has been imported. Once the data has been imported, you can now analyse the quantitative data. You can can draw graphs and tables – which can be  exported – and you can also carry out simple statistical tests such as  t-tests, ANOVA and correlations.

It is also quite easy to combine these in a mixed-methods study.

One important feature of  Dedoose is that, as the application is cloud based, it enables users to work on a project collaboratively.

Dedoose works with a subscription model. It can be quite expensive in the long run, but it does allow a free trial period of one month and it provides the ability to subscribe for just one month (student price $12.95 per month) and could be useful for a small mixed-methods project such as an MA dissertation..

 

Extracting Comments from Documents

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The main reason I write the blog is to sort out my thoughts. Writing is a good way to clarify your mind.

I also use the blog to help me remember things that I do not do very often.

Like many teachers, I use Microsoft Word’s track changes facility to comment on student work.

This is also useful for marking dissertations. The problem, though, is that comments are dispersed throughout the whole 15,000 word dissertation and I would like them all together. It is possible to see all the comments as a list, but I do not think you can export them.

After some searching I discovered Kutools from ExtendOffice. Kutools for Word adds two menus to the MS Word Toolbar – Kutools and Kutools Plus. With Kutools Plus, in the File group, you can chose More and then Export Comments. Choose the whole document and  you obtain all the comments together. Very useful.

Make sure that Track Changes is off, though.

This file can easily be edited.

Many students, though, hand in their work as an Adobe pdf document. It is easy to add comments and to see a list, but it is not easy to export them as one list.

You can use  PDF Extractor from SysTools  to extract the comments and save them as an MS Word document.

The problem now is that all the comments are in individual text frames. Kutools, though can remove them.

Remove Group -> Remove All Frames
Remove Group -> Breaks -> Remove All Page Breaks

This file can easily be edited.

Turnitin Similarity Report

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I have been supervising dissertation students recently at several institutions.

One thing that has been mentioned several times is the interpretation of the Turnitin Similarity Report. One student showed me her Turnitin report in which she had received a similarity score of 32%. She was worried as she had been told that anything above 20% was problematic. I looked at her work and found that most of the 32% similarity was made up of typical EAP phrases. Examples are “questions have been raised over the ,,,”, “… have received very little consideration” and “this evidence leads us to reject the hypothesis that…” These are kinds of phrases that EAP students are expected to learn and use and are covered in books such as Jeanne Godfrey’s The student phrase book (Godfrey, 2013) and John Morley’s online Academic Phrasebank.

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Dissertation Management

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I have been supervising MA student doing dissertations for many years now at several institutions and this is the time of year when we usually get started.

As soon as I am given the list of students who I will be supervising, I usually email each student and give them some information about me. I ask them to reply with some information about themselves. Some reply quickly, some reply slowly and some do not reply at all until I have sent several reminders.

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Reporting Findings from Interviews

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I have been supervising students doing research at both undergraduate and graduate levels recently and many of the students have been doing qualitative studies, involving interviews. In doing so, I have found that many of them find it difficult to report their findings and provide evidence. I am not surprised as there does not seem to be much information available. As Robert Yin (2011, p. 234) has made clear:

At a minimum, a common kind of narrative data would take the form of quotations and paraphrased passages, representing your study participants’ descriptions their own lives, actions, and views. In qualitative research, even these briefer descriptions serve as an important form of data. Not surprisingly, the choices about how to present these narrative data are more than a matter of literary style. Methodological issues also are relevant. Yet, this type of narrative — whether brief or lengthy — has not received much attention in existing guides for doing qualitative research.

I have looked through the publications in the references list below. Most of them are excellent, but none of them provide the useful information that my students need.

There are some useful suggestions, but none of them – apart from Yin – are detailed enough:

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More History of IATEFL ESP SIG Publication

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I’m preparing a presentation in commemoration of the 50th Issue of the IATEFL ESP SIG publication for the IATEFL conference IN Brighton in April  Here are a few more images that I plan to use, plus some figures and charts drawn from an analysis of article titles from 50 issues of the publication:

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Languages for Specific Purposes: Review.

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Language for Specific Purposes. Sandra Gollin-Kies, David R. Hall, and Stephen H. Moore. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Theoretical and practical books about ESP teaching are rare, so I was happy to see this book available recently. Although the title is “Languages for Specific Purposes”, most of the examples are from English and as well as that useful research from other languages is included. The book is highly recommended to all ESP, including EAP, teachers.

In Language for Specific Purposes, Gollin-Kies, Hall, and Moore provide a good overview of the history, concepts, application, pedagogy and research of language for specific purposes (LSP).

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IATEFL ESP SIG Journal

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After 10 years of support, Garnet Education are no longer be in a position to sponsor the IATEFL SIG Journal after issue 47. Garnet Education has provided unmatched professional support of the highest quality which stretches from issue 30 (Summer-Autumn 2007) until now (issue 47). They have also sponsored the publication of four ESP SIG books, and for this we are indebted too. With Garnet’s sponsorship we have been able to develop a solid set of EAP and ESP publications which we will now have to maintain in our own right.

It is now necessary to make plans for the future of the journal. The opinion of the ESP SIG committee and the journal editors is that they should take this opportunity to switch to an electronic version of the journal in the immediate future in order to keep up with the times. The committee wanted to know what members thought of this proposal. A short questionnaire was sent out. The committee hoped that IATEFL would publish the findings, but, as they didn’t, here they are:

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