Presented in "Approaches to Research Class" May 2005.
Flinders, University, Adelaide, South Australia
Nanang Bagus Subekti
Suppose that you want to understand the ways how foreign language learners find out the meaning of unknown words found in the text, the knowledge that they use, the cognitive actions that they take and the strategies they employ. How would we go with this? One obvious possibility is to ask some foreign language learners how they learn unknown words found in the text. A good method in this situation is by giving a learner a text and asking the him to learn the meaning of the unknown words found in the text and instructing him to think aloud. The following is the example of the research question in my study" What procedures do foreign language learners use when they encounter unknwon words in order to understand and remember them? How frequently are these different strategies used? Then what they said could be recorded and used as data for analysis of the design process.
The think alound method consists of asking people to thin aloud while solving a problem and analysing the resulting verbal protocols. This method is widely used in psychological and educational research pn cognitive processes and knowledge acquisiton. In many cases, the think aloud method is a unique source of information on cognitive processes (van Someran et al., 1994). They also stated that the think alound method is applied most frequently in problem solving. Furthermore, the think alound method can be used to investigate diffrences in problem solving abilities between people, diffrences in tasks, effects of instruction and other factors that have an effect on problem solving. This method, in pricipalm does not lead too much disturbance of the thought process (van Someran et al., 1994).
There are several types of verbal reports (van Someran et al., 1994).
1. The verbal reporting process (Concurrent verbalisation).
2. Restrospective verbalisation (Retropective verbalisation).
3. Instropection
4. Question and Prompting.
5. Dialogue observation.
The following studies used the think aloud to investigate the phenomena, for example research on the vocabulary learning strategies of foreing language students by Lawson and Hogben (1996), Research on the incestigation of translation process by Bernardini (2005), and the study of translation by Li (2004). According to Ericsson and Simon (1993), three assumptions are made while adopting the methodology of protocol analysis:
1. Only the outputs of the cognitive process are available to the consciousness and are verbalisable;
2. Performace on any given task can be conceptualised as a set of sequential processes with intermediate products that are available to working memory. The intermediate products are conceptualised as being directly associated with observable indicators, in this case, verbal protocols,
3. The total time to generate a response is equal to sum of the individual cognitive processes.
The advantages and disadvantages
In conducting the think aloud method in a study, there are several points that should be considered, like concurrent verbal protocols have been seen to cause problems when the task involves high cognitive load, when the information is difficult to verbalise because of its form, i.e., visual data, or when the processes are automatic for the participants (Branch, 2000). In addition, the difficulty which may happen to the participant is called reactivity problem ( Stratman & hamp-Lyons). They suggest there are five factors that may cause reactivity in concurrent verbal protocols:
1. Experimental task directions to subjects that elicit an appropriate level of verbalisation;
2. limited short term memory capacity for talking and attending at the same time;
3. hearing one's voice;
4. learning that occurs because thinking out loud increases subjects' critical attention to their activities;
5. direct or indirect experimenter influence through verbal or non verbal cues.
Please email me to get the details of this paper. nanang_bs@yahoo.com
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