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Since it is not the aim of my study to generalise, it is irrelevant to what extent the students who participate in the study are representative of a wider group. Therefore, purposive sampling in which “researchers hand-pick the cases to be included in the sample on the basis of their judgement of their typicality or possession of the particular characteristics being sought” (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2011, p. 156) was undertaken.

The selection of participants for the study had to be carried out at different stages of the research project. As a first step, the school level at which the research project was conducted had to be chosen. Until then, the majority of empirical studies that looked into literature and cultural learning in the EFL classroom had worked with higher grades of secondary school (Fäcke, 2006; Freitag-Hild, 2010a). In order to widen the scope of research in this field, I therefore intended to focus on lower or intermediate levels of secondary school. The linguistic level of the majority of books and stories from Uganda that were available and considered as suitable (see Chapter 4.1 and 4.4) required that the students participating in the study had an elementary or threshold level of English language proficiency (A2-B1). Therefore, Year 9 of grammar school (Gymnasium) was selected as the sample group. Secondly, the classes participating in the research project had to be chosen. In this context, personal contacts to schools on my part as the researcher played an important role (see Chapter 5.5). Of the two schools that participated in the research project, school A is located in a small town1 in Baden-Württemberg and school B in a city2 in Bavaria. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that school A maintains an educational partnership with a school in Uganda which involves penfriend correspondence, regular fundraising activities and volunteer stays in Uganda. The students from this school could, therefore, be expected to have already come into contact with the country Uganda within the framework of the partnership. School B, however, does not have a partner school in a country of the Global South. There were also eight students ‘with a migration background’3 among the students participating in my study. This was considered important, since previous studies (Burwitz-Melzer, 2003, p. 137; Fäcke, 2006, p. 213) had shown that students who were raised biculturally reacted differently to the literary texts than those who were raised monoculturally.

The majority of the 49 students of the two Year 9 forms, in which the reading project was conducted, could be motivated to take part in the study. Only four students did not give their permission for the analysis of their responses. Thus, the research project was conducted with 45 Year 9 students, 23 girls and 22 boys, who got engaged to a different extent in the study. One student read 14 novels and short stories, two students, on the other hand, did not read any of the texts provided. Some students wrote very long reading diary entries, others only very short, fragmented sentences. From these 45 students participating in the study, 24 were additionally interviewed. These cases were selected by the criterion of maximum variation. In maximum variation sampling “samples are chosen that possess or exhibit a very wide range of characteristics or behaviours respectively, in connection with a particular issue” (Cohen et al., 2011, p. 157). Students with various biographical backgrounds (e.g. students ‘with’ and ‘without a migration background’), diverse types of reading socialisation (e.g. experienced and less experienced readers) and distinct responses to the literary texts (e.g. rather positive and rather negative reactions) were, therefore, chosen for the interviews. Some students, however, did not want to participate in the interviews and thus they could not be selected. Others, who were not chosen for the interviews in the first place, explicitly expressed the wish to be interviewed. To acknowledge their willingness and so as not to demotivate them, interviews were also conducted with these students. Thus, volunteer sampling (Cohen et al., 2011, p. 160) also played an important role here. Finally, twelve students were chosen for an in-depth case analysis (see Chapter 6.1). Also here, the criterion of maximum variation was applied in order to consider a wide spectrum of reactions and ways of dealing with literary texts (see Fäcke, 2006, p. 83; Küppers, 1999, pp. 134–135).