ABSTRACT
Following an initial consideration of the participants’ predispositions towards feedback in Chapter 4, the analyses in this book have since contained investigations of the context focussing on the primary corpus data from the POTTI and POR contexts. However, as was discussed earlier, the accuracy of pragmatic understanding of such discourse can never be fully guaranteed and is always only an interpretation. For this reason, measures were taken to ensure reliability of account in this study, the most important of which was the collection of a second type of primary data, questionnaire data, to form a more effective triangular research design to ensure that the participants’ perspectives are incorporated into the analysis to give a more complete and reliable account (Maxwell 1992). In Chapter 3, the importance of the ‘emic perspective’ (Patton 1990:241, see also Gall et al. 1996, Phillips 1999, Lazaraton 2003), or insider’s view, was discussed in detail and it can most accurately be obtained through elicitations from the participants (for example, through questionnaires, notes, etc.), or more directly by employing a participative researcher research paradigm (Morrow and Schocker 1993, Freeman 1996b, Heron 1996). Both approaches were used in this research. This combination of techniques adds strength and weight to an exclusively corpus-based approach to the study of the discourse, which has tended to prevail in many studies. Indeed, such a lack of consideration for the insider’s perspective could be highlighted as a criticism of such research paradigms. On the other hand, many studies of TP feedback which do attempt to collect data to uncover the views and opinions of the population under scrutiny have tended to analyse the discourse without recourse to quantitative and corpus-based techniques (for example, Blumberg and Cusick 1969, Brown and Hoffman 1969, Zeichner and Liston 1985, Christensen 1988, Roberts 1990, 1991, Wajnryb 1994a, Kurtoglu-Eken 1999, Phillips 1999).
