Analysis of researches,

1. ESTEPHANIA ZACARÍAS
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH ANALYSIS
RESEARCH:
What effects does language anxiety have on ESL students’ decisions to speak English in a middle school classroom?
DESIGN:
The design of this study was chiefly qualitative in nature. The author of this research based on Merriam´s qualitative research characteristic which are the following:
 Looking for meaning that participants created. Interviewing students to find out more about their perspectives of the effects of language anxiety fit this paradigm.
 The researcher is the chief instrument for data gathering and analysis. In this study, the teacher was the primary researcher and instrument for collecting and analyzing data.
 Qualitative research includes fieldwork. In this research the fieldwork included anecdotal observations and interviewing of the researcher’s students.
PURPOSE:
This investigation was designed to explore how language anxiety affects ELLs’ decision to speak English and to identify the factors contributing to language anxiety inside and outside the ESL classroom.
QUESTIONS:
The main question was the following:
o What effect language anxiety has on ESL students’ decision to speak English in a middle school classroom?
Other sub-questions that the researcher included were the following:
o How do students’ perceptions of themselves and others influence their willingness to speak English?
o Are there critical turning points that resilient English Language Learner’s (ELL’s) experiences that propel them beyond challenging obstacles of speaking such as language anxiety?
o Why do middle school ESL students have language anxiety at school?
o How does language anxiety in the mainstream classroom compare to language anxiety in an ESL classroom?

2. ESTEPHANIA ZACARÍAS
METHOD:
 Participants:
Students involved in this study were 29 sixth grade male and female ESL middle school, ranging from ages 11 to 13 years old. From these 29 students, six were interviewed and recorded digitally via Audacity. Four of the students were selected from the six. These four students had an overall average residency in the United States of about nine years.
 Instruments:
This study employed primarily two research instruments:
 Students responded to the English Language Anxiety Scale (ELAS) survey to measure anxiety levels in the classroom. This research instrument was originally designed by Pappamihiel (1999).
 Students were selected to participate in an interview based on the results of the ELAS questionnaire and anecdotal observations by the researcher.
 Data collection:
There were used three techniques for data collection:
o The first data collection technique used was the ELAS from Pappamihiel (2002). It was comprised of twenty questions in both English and Spanish. Students rated responses on a scale of 1 to 5 from strongly agree to strongly disagree.
o The second data collection technique was observation. This observation was more anecdotal in nature because of her role as a teacher. This technique was not exhaustive in nature and was used to help identify and confirm interview candidates of students who demonstrated anxiety and those that did not demonstrate a high level anxiety in the ESL classroom.
o The final data collection technique employed in this investigation was interviewing. Interview candidates were selected by reporting high levels of anxiety, differentiated anxiety levels from mainstream and ESL classroom and/or low levels of anxiety on the ELAS.
 Data analysis:
o The ELAS questionnaire was the first instrument used in data collection. Data was analyzed and disseminated from the 29 students. Attempts were made to look for levels of language anxiety that students reported for particular responses. Comparisons were made in regards to individual student responses, mainstream and ESL classroom differences, and gender.
o Anecdotal observations began at the start of the year since that was a natural role of the teacher and most subjects selected for interviewing shared similar language anxiety characteristics.

3. ESTEPHANIA ZACARÍAS
o Data analysis in interviewing involved coding and notation of student responses into categories (Merriam, 1995). Categories were organized with responses under some questions, which included sub-questions in the context of the research question.
REFERENCE:
Zgutowicz, Ryan (2009). What effects does language anxiety have on ESL students’ decisions to speak English in a middle school classroom?
*WHY DID THE RESEARCHER SELECT THIS KIND OF RESEARCH DESING?
In my opinion, this researcher made up her mind of selecting this design particularly because was the more appropriate since fulfil with all the characteristic, as we know the qualitative design involves investigation of concepts or phenomena and most of them are perceptions and opinions, and we can see that in this research the author needed to verify if the anxiety affects student´s decision to speak in English, look for concepts related to this topic, classroom observations and interviews in order to get the needed information.

4. ESTEPHANIA ZACARÍAS
DESCRIPTIVE RESEARCH ANALYSIS
RESEARCH:
Affective Factors in the EFL Classroom
DESIGN:
This study was a quantitative, correlational research since the purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between affective factors, focusing only on the learning motivation, anxiety, and extraversion, and oral proficiency as well as academic achievement of the EFL students.
PURPOSE:
To analyze the affective factors which may influence the oral proficiency and the English academic achievement of EFL students enrolled in the English courses of CEI of the University of Quintana Roo and investigate whether there is any relationship between these affective factors – learning motivation, speaking anxiety, and extraversion – and the oral proficiency and academic achievement of these EFL students.
HYPOTESYS:
Based on the purpose of the study, the following hypotheses were formulated:
RH-1 There is relationship between students’ degree of motivation and their oral proficiency level.
RH-2 There is relationship between students’ degree of anxiety and their oral proficiency level.
RH-3 There is a relationship between students’ degree of extraversion and their oral proficiency level.
RH-4 There is a relationship between students’ degree of motivation and their academic achievement.
RH-5 There is a relationship between students’ degree of extraversion and their academic achievement.
QUESTIONS:
There are also two research questions formulated:
RQ1.What is the contribution of motivation, anxiety, extraversion, age, gender, English learning experience, time investment, and experience of traveling abroad to oral proficiency?

5. ESTEPHANIA ZACARÍAS
RQ2. What is the contribution of motivation, anxiety, extraversion, age, gender, English learning experience, time investment, and experience of traveling abroad to academic achievement?
METHOD:
 Participants:
The researcher randomly chose four to five classes from each level, and with the assistance of some teachers, the survey was administered to 352 students. From these 352 returned surveys, 109 were considered as invalid and were discarded because of incompleteness. Thus, the researcher held a total of 243 valid surveys for data analysis. The 243 subjects (105 males, 43.2% of the total participants; and 138 females, 56.8% of the total participants) participated in this research in the fall semester of the 2007 academic year.
 Instruments:
 Three questionnaires were applied to measure students' degree of motivation, anxiety, and extraversion respectively in their EFL learning.
o The Foreign Language Learning Motivation Scale (FLLM)
o The Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety Scale (FLSAS)
o The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, Revised Version (EPQ-R)
 A Background Information Questionnaire was applied to collect the data needed for the secondary variables: age, gender, learning experience, time investment, and experience of traveling abroad.
 Data collection:
 The Foreign Language Learning Motivation Scale (FLLM)
This 34-item questionnaire was made of three major components concerning learning motivation: learning needs, self-efficacy, and achievement motivation. In order to measure each participant’s degree of foreign language learning motivation, the instrument was developed based on a scale of five points, ranging from 1 point “strongly disagree” to 5 point “strongly agree”.
 The Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety Scale (FLSAS)
The FLSAS was a scale of 24 items, which were used to measure only the degree of respondents’ speaking anxiety. Three constructs of the language speaking anxiety were interweaved into the items: communication apprehension, test anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation.
The final FLSAS used a 5-point scale, ranging from 1 point “strongly disagree” to 5 point “strongly agree”, to measure the degree of speaking anxiety.

6. ESTEPHANIA ZACARÍAS
 The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, Revised Version (EPQ-R)
The researcher used 19 yes-no questions concerning only Extraversion from the original questionnaire. Participants were asked to answer the questionnaire without taking too much time pondering over each question; they were also informed that there was no right or wrong answer. Because there were only 19 questions, if the respondent answered “yes”, these were considered as points.
 Background Information Questionnaire
Four questionnaires printed into a four-page survey were used, which contained a total of 85 items. Participants were asked to write their name so as to relate to the names from the lists of final grades their teacher provided
 Data analysis:
o Research Question 1: “There is relationship between students’ degree of motivation and their oral proficiency level”.
The first research hypothesis was proven true. Three variables were found related significantly to the dependent variable, oral proficiency. First, there was a positive correlation between degree of motivation and oral proficiency. It can be argued that those participants who were generally highly motivated in learning English tended to perform better when speaking English because they may spend more time practicing or may take risks more willingly when it comes to communicating in English.
o Research Hypothesis 2: There is relationship between students’ degree of anxiety and their oral proficiency level.
A negative correlation was found between the degree of anxiety and oral proficiency. Hence, it could be argued that those who were less anxious in terms of communication apprehension, test anxiety or fear of negative evaluation demonstrated a greater proficiency in oral skills.
o Research Hypothesis 3: There is a relationship between students’ degree of extraversion and their oral proficiency level.
No significant correlation was found between extraversion and oral proficiency. Although more than half of the participants were more extraverted according to the distribution of the degree of extraversion, the result of the correlation shows that the degree of extraversion did not affect students’ oral performance in EFL classrooms.
o Research Hypothesis 4: There is a relationship between students’ degree of motivation and their academic achievement

7. ESTEPHANIA ZACARÍAS
Three significant correlations were detected. First, academic achievement was found positively correlated to the degree of motivation . This suggests that, generally speaking, the more motivated the students are in the process of EFL acquisition, the better they may achieve academically. The other two significant correlations were observed. Academic Achievement was found positively correlated to Self-efficacy and to Achievement Motivation . The former result implies that the more the students believed that it is possible for them to accomplish their goal or to successfully acquire the language, the better they can really achieve in the end. The latter positive result indicates that the more motivated the participants are to attain excellence in EFL acquisition, the greater extent they can succeed academically.
o Research Hypothesis 5: There is a relationship between students’ degree of extraversion and their academic achievement.
No significant relationship was detected between participants’ degree of extraversion and their academic achievement. This means that this factor does not affect students’ level of competence and performance in any way.
 REFERENCE:
Cheng, Wen-Chen (2008). Affective Factors in the EFL Classroom
*WHY DID THE RESEARCHER SELECT THIS KIND OF RESEARCH DESING?
I consider that the researcher decided to choose this kind of research design because she knew that she was going to use hypothesis and questions in order to prove them, therefore as we know this design do all that, preconceives hypotheses or questions, describe explicitly a phenomenon and in this case is what the author did.