Pilot Study of the Research

Sudman and Bradburn (1983: 283) claim: if you do not have the resources to pilot-
test your questionnaire, dont do the study, so pilot study is an indispensable process
of research, and intentions to exclude pilot study from research will make the quality
of the study in jeopardy (Dornyei, 2007: 75). Accordingly, it is significant to conduct
a pilot study before the real research initials. Besides, our research consists of twelve
closed-ended questions and four open-ended questions, i.e. this is a mixed method
approach research. As Dornyei (2007: 75) points out QUAL piloting differs from
QUAN piloting with regards to processing the data collected from the QUAL pilot
study, we also regarded the data collected from the four open-ended questions in the
pilot study as the ones which will be interpreted afterwards. Richards (2005: 78) also
suggests the differences between the data collected from the research and the pilot
study in QUAL are food for analysis, not a problem for consistency.

Justification for the pilot, explanation of why we will do this pilot study.

We conducted a pilot study in April 2018 in a Chinese international middle school

where I had been an English teacher there for three years to trial the instruments that
will be used in this research. Because this is an international middle school, some
students will study abroad after they graduate from the school; therefore, both EAP
and GE courses are taught in the school. Considering all respondents that will engage
in the final research are native speakers, we chose ten foreign teachers in my school
who come from the UK and the US to make sure respondents of the pilot study are
similar to the final respondents. The diversity of the respondents of the pilot study is
considerable in relation to the length of teaching experience, types of English being
taught and genders. Therefore, this pilot study involved very similar respondents
comparing to the final respondents.
Justification for reliability of this pilot study by elaborating the specific situation of
respondents involved in this pilot study.

As Dornyei (2007: 112) suggests the stepwise process of pilot study, we conduct a
two-phase pilot study which contains 1) Initial piloting of the item pool; 2) Final
piloting (dress rehearsal). During the first phase, we invited four classmates from
MA Applied Linguistics in the University of Liverpool to test the draft of our
questionnaire. After the test we revised the wording of some statements and deleted
some statements. During the second phase, I called for the help of my ex-colleagues
(ten native speakers from the UK and the US) in China to test the questionnaire which
is the near-final version.

Justification of the validity of the pilot study by illustrating the process (or
procedures) of this pilot study.

Seymour Sudman, Norman M. Bradburn. 1986. Asking questions: a practical guide

to questionnaire design. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

ZOLTAN DORNYEI. 2007. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics Quantitative,

Qualitative and Mixed Methodologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lyn Richards. 2005. Handling qualitative data: a practical guide. London: SAGE.