Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

JEZIK U UPOTREBI / LANGUAGE IN USE
would not be possible to objectively assess the degree of their development, nor
was it the aim of the course.
Although it was not assessed, we did observe students’ growth and development
continuously (cf. Schulz 2008), through individual sessions with each student
throughout the course and particularly during their final essay-writing project. The
dialogical exchange used in the individual sessions aimed not to tell students what
to think, but rather to help them learn how to think, while choosing the topics and
dealing with them through observation and critical reflection. Students could revise
all their written work if they wanted to, using instructors’ comments and feedback,
because we considered the willingness to invest time, effort and thought in the projects
another important indicator of students’ development and growth. After all, as
Byram and colleagues (2002) point out, ‘[t]he role of assessment is […] to encourage
learners’ awareness of their own abilities in intercultural competence, and to
help them realise that these abilities are acquired in many different circumstances
inside and outside the classroom (Byram et al. 2002: 32).
3.2. Methodology
The investigation of the written products of students’ work in the course, their
journals (n=42) and final essays (n=40), aimed to find out (1) which topics and
themes emerged in students’ writing and which were the most frequent, indicating
their focus of attention (Weber 1990); (2) what elements and components of
culture they singled out for analysis, i.e. what level of the cultural ‘iceberg’ they
observed; and (3) what kind of attitudes they expressed towards cultural diversity,
and if they showed bias, prejudice or stereotypical thinking.
The methodology used for analysis included the initial quantitative content
analysis of the texts through the TextSTAT program (Simple Text Analysis Tool,
2.7, Hüning 2007), in order to identify words, phrases, concepts and themes of
potential interest, and the subsequent qualitative analysis of the identified themes
and concepts (Berelson 1952; Carley 1990) in the context in which they occurred,
since the program offered the possibility of concordance or KWIC (key word in
context) analysis. The quantitative analysis served as the first step in deciding
how to code the data for categories of terms, concepts, and themes. Our analysis
can thus be described as grounded, or emergent, in that the content categories
emerged from the data and were not pre-conceived or given a priori (Stemler
2001). In formulating the categories of themes and concepts for coding, we relied
on their definition as meaningful, pertinent, clearly delimited, ‘mutually exclusive
and exhaustive units of information’ (GAO 1996: 20).
The whole corpus was manually coded into content categories through
conceptual content analysis. Since the coding and categorizing of our data was
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