Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education by Nat Bartels

EDWARDS AND OWEN 47to remove any sample bias caused by lack of internet access or inadequate systemrequirements on the part of otherwise willing respondents.5. RESULTS5.1. Return RatesEmails were dispatched to 125 potential subjects inviting response. This process yielded86 partial and 59 fully completed questionnaires. Thus a total return rate of 69% (whichwe consider to be very satisfactory, given the remote locations of respondents and thetime lapse of up to three years since many had last been contacted by us) was reduced to48% fully useable returns.5.2. Questionnaire ResultsSection A allowed us to establish that before starting the programme, all 86 respondentshad been teaching languages (all but one English) in a wide range of public and privatesector institutions, at various levels and age-groups and in various countries, and on bothpart- and full-time bases. This finding suggests that responses in subsequent sections ofthe questionnaire would carry the authority of professional experience.5.3. Views of Sociolinguistics Compared with Other TopicsSection B comprised four sub-sections designed to reveal how accurately respondentsremembered the composition of their twelve-course programme, and to compare howthey rated each of the courses they claimed to have followed in terms of personalimportance, professional gain and general importance. There is not space to report ourresults for this section in detail here, but the key findings were:1.2.3.4.The very small number of mis-responses (fewer than 3%) to the first question(‘Which of the following courses constituted part of your MA programme ...?’)reinforced our confidence in the genuineness and accuracy of other responses.In response to the question, ‘How important was it to you, as a languageteaching professional, that these courses were part of your MA programme?’sociolinguistics fares reasonably well compared with the other eleven availablecourses iii . 57.4% of the 54 respondents who completed this item rated sociolinguisticsas having been ‘essential’, compared with the mean ‘essential’ score for all availablecourses of 69.3% (SD = 20.2, z = 0.59).‘How much did you gain from each course in terms of your professionaldevelopment?’ also elicits an enthusiastic response, with 70.0% of respondentsfeeling they had gained ‘a lot’ or ‘quite a lot’ from sociolinguistics, compared with amean for all available courses of 72.7% (SD = 14.3).In terms of how important respondents felt each course to be in more generalterms, i.e. whether they would include them if planning a similar programme, wefound that subjects would be less likely to include topics they had not themselves