Life History interviews
Each SP was invited to have a focused Life History interview with the researcher. In these
sessions, the researcher went beyond the lecture context and discussed general issues about
language learning with the SP. The SPs were frank about the problems they had experienced
in learning English, and how this might affect their learning at university. The main data collection period was conducted during the students’ first year at university,
a period when they may have more difficulties in coping with their Englishmedium
lectures. However, contact was maintained between the students and the researcher for the
full three years of the students’ degree program, for further data collection, and verification
of the interpretation of the data.
Each of the research instrument tools in Table 1 was piloted prior to use with the SPs in
the study. Once the data had been collected it was transcribed and loaded onto a computer
software program (NUD*IST Vivo, Version II). This program is designed to help
researchers handle nonnumerical and unstructured data. The data was then coded and sorted
according to emerging themes. Data from the different sources were triangulated. That is, to
be included in the theory building process the comments had to have been collected with
more than one research tool, and so a process of crosschecking was conducted to verify the
comments. One of the main themes which emerged from the triangulation method was
features which make an L2 lecture comprehensible for the students, and easier to deliver for
the lecturers.