P RESENTING THE DATA

All the data gathered during the interviews had now been sorted according to code. The next thing that needed to be done was to decide how to present these data so that readers of the survey would be able to understand them. I decided on using two different methods of presentation. First I gave a comparative analysis of all the information from all the interviews, before moving on to presenting two cases. One of these case studies is a composite case put together by me on the basis of 11 of the informants. The other is a regular case study of one informant and how he works on reading. I will go through both the comparative analysis and the two case studies below.

4.6.1 A comparative analysis

The first thing that needs to be addressed here is what a comparative analysis is. Looking to the theory of the area I find that the goal for a comparative analysis is to compare cases in order to find similarities and differences between these cases with regards to different topics (Ragin as cited in Sivesind, 2007, p. 250). What this means is that I have to look at what all the informants said about, for example reading strategies, and compare their answers looking for similarities and differences. This is what I have done in chapter 5 where I present the results of my survey.

In order to present the information in a way that is understandable and easy to read I divided chapter 5 into these five sections:

1. Background information 2. What and how much is read?

3. Reading strategies

4. What are the teachers’ attitudes towards the teaching of reading?

5. What literary and computer resources are available?

6. How are specific aims from the LK06 syllabus worked on?

As we can see these six topics are directly related to the codes I chose to use when sorting the data from my interviews. Next, I went through all these topics giving an analysis of what the informants answered with regards to each topic separately and then I compared their answers looking for similarities and/or differences between them. These were then presented to the reader. My intention with this analysis was to give an overview of how reading is worked on by my informants.

Having done this I found that a total of nine informants hardly worked on reading at all, and that the main reason given for this was that there was not enough time. I also found that one informant worked extensively on reading and reading strategies within the time frame of the subject. This was something I discovered during this analysis and therefore wrote a case study of the informant who worked on reading to compare him to the rest of the informants.

I will go through the case studies in section 4.6.2 below.

4.6.2 Two case studies

As mentioned above I decided to write two case studies in order to see what the informant who found the time to work on reading and reading strategies in class did differently from the other informants. I started by looking at this informant, here named Fredrik, using the original transcript of the interview. I no longer used the coded material, as the goal here was

to give a detailed description of only one informant, showing what he did in order to find the time to work on reading. Having written the case study I decided that I needed to compare this case study to another in order to be able to point out the differences between him and the others clearly.

At first I decided to write a case study of just one other informant, however, after having done that I reconsidered. Most of the informants I interviewed answered the questions on how they worked on reading quite similarly, and I started to think that it would be wrong to use just one of the informants to portray all of the nine informants that do not work to any extent on reading. I discussed it with my thesis supervisor and he recommended that I write a composite case based on the answers from all these informants in order to show how their work on reading differs from the work done by Fredrik. I decided to name the fictious informant of this composite case Joakim. In order to write this case study I had to go back and use the coded transcriptions again, as there were too many interviews that were to be included in this case study for me to be able to use the original transcript.

Having written both case studies I proceeded to compare and contrast them. This was done to show how Fredrik’s teaching differed from the composite case, and more importantly how he found the time to work extensively on reading within the time frame of the subject when the others did not.

To sum up, I used both a comparative analysis and case study description in order to present the data from my survey. The goal for the comparative analysis was to give a general

overview of what the situation, with regards to reading, is like in upper secondary school today, based on information given by my informants. The goal for the case studies on the other hand was to give a practical example of how reading can be worked extensively on within the limitations of the subject. In order to show this I wrote one composite case study and one case study of a single informant and compared them in order to show clearly how the teaching practise differed.