Doing Action Research in English Language Teaching

A Guide for Practitioners

Anne Burns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135183837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

This hands-on, practical guide for ESL/EFL teachers and teacher educators outlines, for those who are new to doing action research, what it is and how it works. Straightforward and reader friendly, it introduces the concepts and offers a step-by-step guide to going through an action research process, including illustrations drawn widely from international contexts. Specifically, the text addresses:

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• action research and how it differs from other forms of research

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• the steps involved in developing an action research project

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• ways of developing a research focus

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• methods of data collection

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• approaches to data analysis

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• making sense of action research for further classroom action.

Each chapter includes a variety of pedagogical activities:

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• Pre-Reading questions ask readers to consider what they already know about the topic
• Reflection Points invite readers to think about/discuss what they have read
• action points ask readers to carry out action-research tasks based on what they have read
• Classroom Voices illustrate aspects of action research from teachers internationally
• Summary Points provide a synopsis of the main points in the chapter

Bringing the 'how-to' and the 'what' together, Doing Action Research in English Language Teaching is the perfect text for BATESOL and MATESOL courses in which action research is the focus or a required component.

Chapter 1: What is action research?

Pre-reading questions

Before you read this chapter, think about the following questions. If possible discuss them with a colleague or write some brief responses to each one.

• What is action research?
• What do you already know about doing action research?
• What steps are involved in doing action research?

We will explore these questions in this chapter.

Language teachers all around the world want to be effective teachers who provide the best learning opportunities for their students. Action research (AR) can be a very valuable way to extend our teaching skills and gain more understanding of ourselves as teachers, our classrooms and our students. In this first chapter, we begin by looking at some of the key concepts in AR – what it is, what characterises it, how it relates to other types of research, and what basic steps are followed when we do it. We will consider what is different about doing AR from doing what all good teachers do – thinking about what is happening in our classrooms. But we will also explore a question you may have already asked yourself – why should teachers bother to do research when, after all, they are employed and paid to be teachers and not researchers?

Reflection point

What are your views about teachers doing research? In your opinion, what are the advantages and disadvantages of being a teacher researcher?

We will come back to these issues later in the chapter.

Action research (AR) is something that many language teachers seem to have heard about, but often they have only a hazy idea of what it actually is and what doing it involves. So, one of the first questions teachers new to AR usually ask is: What is action research?

What is action research?

AR is part of a broad movement that has been going on in education generally for some time. It is related to the ideas of ‘reflective practice’ and ‘the teacher as researcher’. AR involves taking a self-reflective, critical, and systematic approach to exploring your own teaching contexts. By critical, I don’t mean being negative and derogatory about the way you teach, but taking a questioning and ‘problematising’ stance towards your teaching. My term, problematising, doesn’t imply looking at your teaching as if it is ineffective and full of problems. Rather, it means taking an area you feel could be done better, subjecting it to questioning, and then developing new ideas and alternatives. So, in AR, a teacher becomes an ‘investigator’ or ‘explorer’ of his or her personal teaching context, while at the same time being one of the participants in it.

So, one of the main aims of AR is to identify a ‘problematic’ situation or issue that the participants – who may include teachers, students, managers, administrators, or even parents – consider worth looking into more deeply and systematically. Again, the term problematic does not mean that the teacher is an incompetent teacher. The point is that, as teachers, we often see gaps between what is actually happening in our teaching situation and what we would ideally like to see happening.

The central idea of the action part of AR is to intervene in a deliberate way in the problematic situation in order to bring about changes and, even better, improvements in practice. Importantly, the improvements that happen in AR are ones based on information (or to use the research term, data) that an action researcher collects systematically. (Incidentally, data is the plural from the Latin word ‘datum’ meaning ‘something known’, so you will find me using it in the plural.) So, the changes made in the teaching situation arise from solid information rather than from our hunches or assumptions about the way we think things are. To understand what this means in more concrete terms, let’s consider an actual classroom situation in Italy where a language teacher identified a problematic area in her teaching.

Classroom voices

Isabella Bruschi is a teacher of English language and literature in an upper secondary school in Turin, Italy. Isabella’s starting point for AR was her negative feelings about the oral tests (interrogazione oral) she used in class. She had a whole cluster of questions and doubts about this aspect of her teaching and she was concerned to find out how she could improve things for herself and her students.

What makes me feel so uncomfortable when I have to assess students’ oral English? Do I know what happens during an oral test? Am I aware of the nature of the questions I ask and of their different weight? How do I react when students give me the wrong answers? When I intend to help students do I in fact help them? What do my students think of my way of conducting an oral test? What are their preferences?

To understand the nature of her problem, she collected this information:

• She kept a diary to explore her feelings of uneasiness.
• She gave students a questionnaire to investigate their preferences and difficulties in oral tests.
• She recorded a number of oral tests.
• She asked students for written feedback after the test.
• She asked a facilitator to interview students after the oral test.

The recordings gave her back an image very far from the ideal she had of herself as a teacher. There was a mismatch between her intention to facilitate students’ responses during the test and what was actually happening. She saw a set of behaviours that did not please her. She became aware of her “disturbing interventions”. These were the interruptions she made that were distracting students from searching their minds or following their trains of thought.

These are the patterns she found in the way she was questioning students:

1. Frequent interruptions while students were looking for the answer or for the right word.
2. Questions posed in a sequence, which often changed the original focus and resulted in students feeling embarrassed as they don’t know which question to answer first.
3. Questions which suggested how students should answer.
4. Use of questions formulated as open questions, but treated by the teacher as if they were closed questions.
5. Subsequent use of negative reinforcement in spite of the intention to be helpful.
6. Use of feedback of the type, “no, I actually wanted you to tell me …”

When she looked at the students’ responses to the open questions in the questionnaire, she found that they confirmed these patterns, as these examples show:

I don’t like being interrupted all the time without having the possibility of carrying forward what I want to say.

Being passive. When the teacher talks too much.

The questions “in bursts”, without being given the time to answer.

As a result of this information, she set up three strategies to improve her teaching:

1. Giving students the questions for the oral test five minutes before answering so that they could have time to think and organise their ideas.
2. Restricting her interventions to a minimum.
3. When interviewing, paraphrasing what students say to help them keep the thread of their thoughts, search their memory or trigger off new ideas.

Her students’ comments after the test show that these changes made a big difference:

What I liked in the oral test was the fact that you didn’t interrupt me while I was speaking. (Mara)

I appreciate the fact that you didn’t interrupt me while I was talking and that you tried to help when I had difficulties, and the fact that you were listening attentively to what I was saying, while encouraging me to go on. (Sabrina)

I felt helped when the teacher repeated what I had said. This helped me reformulate my thoughts more clearly. (Francesca)

This is what Isabella writes at the end of the AR cycle. When she considers what it has all meant for her teaching:

I have a neat perception of the changes I’ve been through, which doesn’t mean that I have solved all my problems. I have certainly acquired new tools, and, above all, a greater awareness of my being a teacher. Observing and analysing … have made me see more clearly the asymmetric nature of classroom communication. As a result I now feel more in control of what happens during an oral test.

She adds this comment on how the research will continue to have an impact on her teaching and how she intends to continue her investigations:

I don’t think my research ends here. I think the way I formulate and ask the [test] questions is open to further enquiry and reflection. The research on my “questioning” of students has opened up new perspectives to my teaching. Now I know that the cycle of explanation–oral test–assessment is inadequate. What I need to investigate now are the opportunities I give my students to pose questions themselves and the space I give them to discuss ideas among themselves. In other words, what opportunities do I give them to practise such skills as selecting, ordering and organising information into a coherent speech before taking the oral test? Do I give them enough time to understand and learn in the first place? My new research will be on alternative ways to do assessment, keeping in mind that as a teacher I am not just a transmitter of knowledge, but a facilitator of processes so as to make students autonomous in the construction of their knowledge.

(Data translated and supplied by Graziella Pozzo)

Isabella’s situation illustrates how AR can throw a light on our teaching practices and improve an unsatisfactory situation. It shows how she identified and improved a classroom dilemma by using a reflective research cycle of planning, acting, observing and reflecting.

Reflection point

Look back at the pre-reading notes you made for this chapter. Would you add anything to your statements about AR?

If possible, discuss your ideas with a colleague.

Here are some descriptions of AR that were suggested by three of my teacher researcher students located in different parts of Mexico. At this point, you may want to compare what you think with their ideas about AR.

Classroom voices

Action research is research carried out in the classroom by the teacher of the course, mainly with the purpose of solving a problem or improving the teaching/learning process. (Elizabeth, Sonora)

Action research is carried out by teachers in their context, in their classrooms. Teachers identify a problem or an area they wish to improve and based on theory or experience or a hypothesis they think of an intervention. They document the intervention and results of it. If the results are positive they could lead to the dissemination of the information. If not, the cycle may be started again. (Iraís, Tlaxcala)

AR is a reflective process that aims to solve a particular teaching-learning problem that has been identified. One of the aims of AR is to improve the teaching practice and in the long run the whole curriculum. In order to do action research it is necessary to carry out a rigorous study in which the problem has to be clearly specified, an action plan has to be described and carried out, and finally an evaluation has to be contemplated in order to show if the decisions taken were the adequate ones. (Carmen, Mexico City)

To follow up what these Mexican teachers stated, here are some definitions offered by writers on action research:

‘self-reflective enquiry’ undertaken by participants in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own social or educational practices as well as their understanding of these practices and the situations in which these practices are carried out. (Carr & Kemmis, 1986, p. 220)

the study of a social situation with the view to improving the quality of the action in it. (Elliott, 1991, p. 69)

a flexible methodology, not merely in terms of being eclectic in research methods, but more fundamentally in needing to adapt to the social and political situation in which it is employed. (Somekh, 1993, p. 29)

small scale intervention in the functioning of the real world and a close examination of the effects of such intervention. (van Lier, 1996, p. 32)

a self-reflective, systematic and critical approach to enquiry by participants who are at the same time members of the research community. The aim is to identify problematic situations or issues considered by the participants to be worthy of investigation in order to bring about critically informed changes in practice. Action research is underpinned by democratic principles in that ownership of change is invested in those who conduct the research. (Burns, in Cornwell, 1999, p. 5)

All these various definitions suggest that AR is not just a simple question of following a fixed pattern to solve a straightforward technical problem in an individual classroom. The aims and contributions of AR are multiple, overlapping, and varied. As Edge explains, using examples to illustrate the possibilities, AR may be:

• means oriented: We know that we are trying to teach people to write English on this course. How can we improve the ways in which we do so?
• ends oriented: We know that these students want to become librarians. How sure are we about the importance of teaching them to write in English?
• theory oriented: As we investigate our teaching of writing, how can we articulate our increased understanding of what is happening here? How can we connect with other written records in order to theorize our practice and perhaps, contribute to the theory that informs us?
• institution oriented: To what extent is my writing course, through its goals, its topics, and my practice, contributing to an integrated educational program through which the institution mediates between its students and its social context?
• society oriented: To what extent is my writing course, through its goals, its topics, and my practice, promoting values that I believe in (e.g. contributing to a healthy dialogic relationship among students, teachers, institution and society at large)?
• teacher oriented: Where is my own personal and professional development in this? What is the contribution to collegiality and, thereby, the kind of society I want to live in?

(Edge, 2001, p. 5)

Why should I do action research? I’m a teacher not a researcher!

At this point you may be thinking that the discussion so far is all very well, but it doesn’t alter the fact that your role as a teacher is to teach. And, indeed, there is every good reason for you to think that doing research is beyond the call of duty. Teachers don’t get paid or given time off to do research as academics do; they have full teaching loads which means that any time spent on research needs to be added onto a busy teaching schedule. Nor does any research they complete necessarily get acknowledged by their colleagues, head teachers or educa...