D ATA COLLECTION ,  PROCESSING AND ANALYSIS

The participants in this study were parents of children who were attending Norwegian schools. The children were between grades one and four. The reason why this age group for children was selected was because of the fact that parents tend to be more involved in assisting younger children with respect to language skills in the home. Ten families were chosen based on their consent after an invitation to participate in the research. A letter of invitation was prepared

by the researcher and was sent with the children home to their families. The reason for choosing the aforementioned participants was due to the nature of this study, which was qualitative and the aim which was to find out the attitudes, supports and strategies which families use for first and second language skill in the home.

Participants in this study have a variety of nationalities. The mothers/fathers in each family were from: Greece/Greece, Romania/Romania, Poland/Poland, Finland/England, Norway/Mexico, Norway/England, Ethiopia/Ethiopia, India/India, Nepal/Nepal, and Iran/Iran. In three of the families parents had a different mother tongue. Among the interviewees, three worked at a kindergarten as an assistant, three did not work, three worked as a teacher, and one worked in a restaurant. All the participants were highly educated. Five participants had a bachelor degree, four had a master degree and one was studying in a master programme.

Among the children, five were attending regular Norwegian schools, four were attending the Johannes Learning Center and one was attending the International School of Stavanger.

Johannes learning center is a kind of school which provides training and teaching for refugees and immigrants, both for adults and the children. The center has pre-school, primary school for the children, and adult Norwegian courses for refugees and immigrants. The International School of Stavanger is an English-language private school for students from pre-school to grade twelve.

The school provides an internationally-accredited education for the students in a multi-cultural environment.

3.2.2. Data collection instrument

A semi-structured interview was chosen to carry out the present research. The idea behind choosing a semi-structured interview was to elicit more responses from the participants while having the questions as a framework in order not to deviate from the questions. Some questions were devised in order for participants to provide explanations of how they are involved in language skill support in the home and what attitudes they have to bilingualism. In addition, questions were devised to elicit answers from parents to give reasons why an emphasis is put on an activity, for example.

The interview guide consisted of three main parts. The first part focused on background of participants such as their age, level of education, number of children, country of origin,

language(s) that parents speak with each other and with their children, and language(s) sibling talk to each other, etc. The second part elaborated on attitudes to bilingualism such as positive or negative attitudes and how parents intend to keep the two languages separately or simultaneously.

The last part focused on language skills for the first and second language. In other words, the focus was on parental strategies to support language skills, which included reading, listening, speaking and writing. In the reading part, there are questions such as the place and the materials parents used to assist their children. In the listening part, there are some questions including the language and time of the day which children watch TV and the kinds of programs they watch, etc. In the speaking section, focus was made on the language which parents and children practice with each other, whether or not they work on vocabulary or accent and so on. In the last part, which focused on writing skills, some question such as the writing activities and spelling were discussed. All the questions were asked for both Norwegian and the family’s mother tongue. The interview guide is provided in the appendix.

3.2.3. Interview piloting and conduction

The interview questions were piloted prior to the main interview conduction. The reason for piloting was to ensure that questions were not vague and were understandable by the interviewee.

According to Dörnyei, (2007:137) piloting is carried out to “ensure that the questions elicit rich data and do not dominate the flow of the conversation”. In addition, piloting allowed the interviewer to test the recording device and the total time which the interview takes. Two piloting sessions were carried out with two volunteers who were not included in the final sample to be interviewed. Volunteers were also parents who were from other countries and had children between grades one and four. After piloting, the researcher revised the questions based on what has been answered and added some relevant questions and deleted questions which were vague and difficult to understand. Piloting also assisted the researcher to add sections to the interview and to separate the questions based on their exact content. Moreover, piloting helped the interviewer to check whether questions were clear in content and comprehensible for all interviewees with different knowledge, culture and educational level.

Four interviews were carried out at Johannes Learning Center, three at Sandnes Learning Center, and three at Bekketunet kindergarten. After finding a quiet place for interviewing, the interviewer started and checked the audio recorder to ensure that it works properly. The

interviews lasted between twenty five and thirty five minutes, depending on the pace of the interview process and the elaborations and explanations that parents provided. In addition to voice recording, the interviewer took notes of the necessary parts. Patton (2002:383) states that taking notes during interviews assists the interviewer to provide new questions which could be asked later in the course of interview. Moreover, notes taken during the interview helped the researcher for later analysis of data and were a backup in the event that something happened to the recording device. Notes taken by the interviewer along with the recorded voices assisted the interviewer to have a clearer picture of what was actually being said. After conducting each interview, the interviewer went through the field notes very quickly to make sure that notes were not ambiguous and asked the interviewees for more clarification.

3.2.4. Interview analysis

The audio recordings of the interviewes were reviewed and transfered to a computer. Each interview was transcribed in a seperated file. For the interpretation and analysis of the data, the researcher went through the interview guide as a framework, section by sention, to find similar or different themes and topics in the answers of the interviewees to each part. In a seperate chapter, all the interviewee’s answeres were dicscussed in detail in order find out the similarities and/or differences between the interviewees. The themes or topics which were common among the interviewees were selected for more discussion and comparison with the previous research in the same area of study. Based on the analysis of the interviews, the researcher could get a view of what most of the participants like or disliked regarding bilingualism and what most of them did in the home to support the language learning development of their children.

3.3. Methodological concerns