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The grounded theory allowed me to follow a systematic methodology for collecting and analyzing data throughout the study. Since I believed that the reality is in the data, not in the literature, I attempted to collect richer data from different perspectives and sources without relying on an existing theory. This increased the value of the research data. And I attempted to interpret it thoroughly. The major challenge was designing interventions according to students’ wants. Students reported mixed feelings about the content of classes and this made it difficult to design classes accordingly. Furthermore, students had limited repertoire of speaking activities and, therefore, they asked to include similar activities throughout the term. To avoid this, I sometimes needed to include different activities to contribute to students’ repertoires of speaking activities. I justified the content of classes each week so that students understand how I implemented student negotiation.

The study inevitably had its constraints and limitations. The main constraint was that it did not test whether student-negotiated speaking classes improved students’ EFL speaking competence. We avoided this because it would have involved the testing of speaking, which in turn would have made the research procedure very complex. Student negotiation is unlikely to improve students’ EFL speaking competence over a limited period of time, and a focus on testing the changes in students’ speaking competences might well have hindered the exploration of important issues that student-negotiated speaking classes had an impact on. In addition, testing students’ speaking performances could have influenced the trustworthiness of the data collected: students could be biased if the research involved testing their speaking competence. Instead, we focused on certain important issues that might indicate the development of EFL speaking skills, such as perceived competence, satisfaction with speaking ability, perceived involvement, anxiety, and willingness to communicate.

The main limitation of the research was its reliance on self-reported data. This is one of the limitations of questionnaires (Dörnyei, 2002) and interviews (Kvale, 1996), in that participants may not provide trustworthy answers, especially when they give information about their perceptions, because of such issues as social desirability and self-deception (Dörnyei, 2002). Although we attempted to overcome this problem through triangulating the data by using observations, this issue remains as one of the limitations. Furthermore, like all classroom research studies, the Hawthorne effect, which is the influence of being researched on behaviors of the participants (Cook, 1962), was a possible limitation of the study. Knowing that they were taking part in a research study, students may have behaved differently in speaking activities. These limitations are important issues to consider in future research studies within a related area.