2) Make sure linguistic imperialism is not
encouraged either directly or indirectly.
One issue that we had not anticipated had to do with
indigenous languages or parents’ and grandparents’
home languages. We felt that it was very important
to make sure that the English language instruction
did not, in any way shape or form, impact the family
home language or one of the family’s home languages.
Consequently, we decided to conduct research into
countries with multiple indigenous languages.
3) Do not burden teachers with extra work in
order for them to participate in the research.
Our original intention was to gather print-based
materials from teachers. What we learned very quickly
was that it would have been an enormous burden for
teachers to gather such materials from their schools.
As mentioned above, in some cases teachers had no
awareness of what was actually sent home to families.
But, more importantly from an ethical standpoint,
we realised that the teachers would have had to invest
a great deal of time in order to gather such materials.
We were also aware that the depth and breadth of
interview-based data was so rich that we did not need
the additional information for this study.
All of the interviews were audio-recorded and
transcribed, rendering hundreds of pages of data.
We analysed the data using qualitative techniques.
The first step was to make a list of all the different
types of techniques or strategies used by teachers.
We then divided these into themes or key categories.
The point of our research was primarily to create
a master list of strategies and techniques rather than
a list of frequency of each technique or strategy.