The language questionnaire. As previously stated, I obtained 66 completed language questionnaires from the young people even though administering the questionnaire was problematic. Ideally, I would have given questionnaires to everyone in the classes I observed and let the young people take them home. Then I could have given an exact rate of return number. However, the fieldwork conditions were not easy as there were varying degrees of co-operation from teachers. So what I decided to do was to collect the maximum number of returns that I could. My concern was not with securing quantitative reliability and validity, but with securing a quantity of questionnaire responses under difficult fieldwork conditions. I administered the questionnaires in various ways. Some of them were administered on an ad hoc basis. This was because many teachers at Figsbury Hoshūkō were reluctant to co-operate directly with my research in the classroom so I thought it was better to administer the questionnaires outside the classroom. My partner administered questionnaires to some of the parents he knew whose children were pupils in the classes I had observed as well as to pupils in other classes. Some interviewees, who had left Hoshūkō or who had not received one previously, completed the questionnaire before the interviews. In three of the classes at Appleton Hoshūkō where I felt the teachers were co-operative with my research the questionnaires were administered within the classroom. In the two upper classes (aged 13-17), the questionnaires were completed in fifteen minutes at the end of the lesson and they were handed directly to me. All the students completed the questionnaires but some more fully than others. In another class students took them home to complete. The pupils were relatively young (aged 10 –11) and fifteen minutes were available at the end of the lesson for me to help them with problems they might have completing it at home. I gave them envelopes so that they would know that only I would be reading the questionnaires and not the class teacher. I did this in order to avoid the ‘wider institutional processes of surveillance and control’ as it is usual for teachers to oversee everything that occurs in the classroom (Barker and Weller, 2003, p. 214). Ten of the fifteen pupils (66%) in the class returned the questionnaire the following week in the envelopes provided. I feel that the language questionnaire was a good way of starting self-reported data elicitation to gain some relative factual in...
