Units of Analysis

Research cycle diagram. [Online Image]. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.casenex.com/casenet/images/methodology_200px.gif.

As noted in the previous entry, once the case study research methodoogy had been chosen and the componentsof the research design had been broadly stated, it was necessary to pinpoint the specificities of each one of them. However, before introducing the first one, it is necessary to make a brief outline of Leclercq and Poumay's 8LEM model, as one of the units is closely related to it.


Leclercq & Poumay's 8LEM

Leclercq & Poumay devised a comprehensive approach to the teaching and learning of any subject –i.e. domain of learning, which allows individuals to develop skills and to apply them to answer any question or solve any situation. In this model, motivational issues, social interaction and individual roles and performance are included in a systematic sequence resulting in the development of academic literacy and citizenship, as content is not seen detached from the social framework, but rather as an essential component for proper understanding. The core element of the model is the concept of learning/teaching event (LE), defined as “the joined description of paradigms […] of a learner’s activity and a tutor (or teacher or coach)’s activity, these actions being complementary and interdependent, in a learning situation.” (Leclercq & Poumay, 2005, p. 1).

These are the eight learning events:


1. Imitation/Modelling

2. Reception/Transmission

3. Exercising/Guidance

4. Exploration/Documenting

5. Experimentation/Reactivity

6. Creation/Confortation

7. Self-reflexion/Co-reflexion and

8. Debate/Animation.

They are represented in Figure 1 below

Figure 1. Graphical representation of the 8LEM from the students’ perspective

The first unit of analysis was the Positive 8LEM role match: The concept of “positive match” was adapted from security procedures and it is related to checking the actual occurrence of a predicted event. Since the 8LEM framework outlined the roles and tasks learners should do in every stage of each module, I decided to design a chart to keep track of their positive realisation of the intended role. The modules led the learners from mostly passive roles in which they answered self-access activity guides on their own with low levels of stress since they were given an entire week to prepare it and send it for correction before moving onto the second stage, done together in which they presented, debated and analysed situations before they were given an additional week to carry out the more actively productive stages of the model, which involved freer research, experimentation, discussion and further creation and the expected process writing task, done together with their peer and the teacher.

The second unit of analysis was the accomplishment of the process writing cycles: The four 8LEM-framed modules, aimed at the production of argumentative essays, had been designed so that the learners carried out certain tasks in each stage of the modules: write a first draft, peer-review their partners’ paper, send it to their teacher for further review and comments –especially in terms of grammar and vocabulary, and write a final draft. These results are put in charts and represented in charts to find patterns with the first unit of analysis.

The third unit of analysis was the score obtained in three different readability formulas. In an attempt to provide a more reliable basis to the analysis of the texts, I decided to use readability formulas, instead of other tools like rubrics or comparison to established outlines, since they still depend on the justification given by every person who applies the rubric or makes the analysis. I then resorted to the concept of readability, a construct defined as: “[a]ccording to Klare (1963) readability is ‘the ease of understanding or comprehension due to style of writing’. This definition focuses on writing style, in contrast to factors like format, features of organisation and content” (as cited by Anagnostou and Weir, 2006, p. 3). The readability formulas are considered “a way to use vocabulary difficulty and sentence length to predict the difficulty level of a text” (DuBay, 2004, p. 2), and in short, is mathematics applied to reading comprehension, an idea which might look outrageous at first. However, a closer analysis of its background proves the underlying importance of the concept of readability: it is related to research in corpus linguistics, the typical cloze exercises so familiar in tests worldwide is based on its principles, and the concept of graded readers derives from the research started in the 1920s. Though there are more than 200 different formulas available and used in various fields, just a few of them have endured criticism and are considered reliable. For the present study, three readability formulas were used and their selection was made on the basis of proven reliability and appropriateness in terms of intended audiences; they were the Flesch-Reading Ease, the New Dale-Chall, and the SMOG Grade. The application of the first one yields a number representing the degree of difficulty in an inverted scale from 1 (difficult) to 100 (easy), while the core obtained from the second and the third readability formulas represents the number of years of education required to understand the text properly. The results were put in a chart to track changes and they were eventually graphed to identify trends, which were again related to the data collected through the previous units of analysis.

 

References

Anagnostou, N.K. & Weir, G.R.S. (2006). From corpus-based collocation frequencies to readability measure. In: ICT in the Analysis, Teaching and Learning of Languages, Preprints of the ICTATLL Workshop 2006, 21-22 Aug 2006, Glasgow, UK. Available from http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/cis/research/publications/papers/strath_cis_publication_1539.pdf

DuBay, W. H. (2004). The principles of readability. Costa Mesa, CA: Impact Information. Available from http://www.impact-information.com/impactinfo/readability02.pdf.

Leclercq, D. & Poumay, M. (2005). The 8 learning events model and its principles. Available from http://www.labset.net/media/prod/8LEM.pdf.