A handbook for Exploratory Action Research

 
What do I find? | 
57
As we see below, Daniela had some further useful 
questions on her questionnaire, of another kind;
1. How do you feel at the moment of speaking English?
2. What kinds of activities do you like or would you like 
to do in English classes? 
These two questions are typical ‘qualitative questions’. 
Such questions are often open questions, with a wide range 
of answers which (as in this case) can help us to understand 
what people are thinking or feeling. They give a voice to the 
participants in our research. 
These two questions, then, gathered what is called 
qualitative data, involving descriptions of feelings, opinions, 
impressions, qualities, etc. Notice how Daniela needed to 
ask these questions in order to understand the causes of 
the problem she had observed. ‘How…?’ and ‘Why…?’ are 
perhaps the two most common qualitative questions. 
Qualitative data, unlike quantitative data, visually presents 
itself as responses, short or longer sentences or even 
paragraphs. 
Task 6.2 
Read about Daniela’s further findings below and then 
answer questions D and E that follow:
D. What additional information did Daniela get by asking
the above two questions? 
E. Why was this useful?
4. How do you feel at the moment of speaking 
English?
Group A (15 students) feel comfortable, relaxed and fine 
when they speak English in class. They feel that 
performing oral activities in classes will help them to 
develop accurate speaking skills.
Group B (23 students) feel nervous, insecure, and not 
confident because they do not have a proper or 
accurate command of the language. Most of them said 
they get nervous, lack confidence and feel embarrassed 
when speaking because they are afraid of making 
mistakes, and hearing their classmates laugh at their 
errors. Among the answers, a few students said that 
when they know the correct answers, they feel great, but 
when the answers are wrong they feel frustrated. Finally, 
only one of them said he does not like oral quizzes or 
tests because he is not sure about his pronunciation.