Hello Linguists and Language Teachers! Especially language teachers because this post is for you. I made my way to the Masters Student Forum today where I got to hear from other students who are doing some really interesting work out there. One student in particular is Emily Durst at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (formerly the Monterey Institute). She talked about action research in her classroom of adult English language learners. For those of us (future) teachers who do not have PhDs but ARE hiding a researcher deep down, action research is really key to our sanity. For those of you not familiar with the term, action research is a systematic approach for teachers to conduct quasi-experimental research in their own classrooms. As I read in Ellis’ book Language Teaching Research and Language Pedagogy (because my professor made us and I’m glad she did), action research “is simply a form of self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own practices, their understanding of these practices, and the situations in which the practices are carried out.” (Carr & Kemmis, 1986).

Durst used this same definition in her presentation today, because it’s a really great, classic definition. It’s a way for us to bridge the gap between research and our own pedagogy–in a sense we are performing research on our own teaching practices. We might see a problem or wonder about a more effective way to teach something, and we tackle it through investigation and reflection. How is this different from our day-to-day reflections on our teaching? When we use action research to investigate a problem or question, we approach it methodically. Ellis proposes the following process for action research: 1)Identifying the issue, 2) Fact finding, 3) Working out a possible solution to the issue, 4) Trying out the solution, 5) Collecting data and 6) Revising if necessary and proceeding with steps 4 and 5 again. This process is context-specific, practical, cyclical, systematic and reflective (Ellis, 2012).

Durst was looking for ways to encourage speech production in her adult English class, and wanted to use specific activities to promote speaking, but needed to know if those activities were actually useful. She recorded 22 hours of class time and coded those hours diligently. In those 22 hours she found that while her perception of the class was that there was a general “cacophony” at times and perceived lack of focused student-to-student talk time, this student talk time was actually very productive and resulted in negotiating of meaning. Which is what we language teachers want! She also found, not surprisingly, that teacher talk occurred 3 times as much when no planned activity was being carried out. She also found three things that really matter: wait time (it may be uncomfortable for us, but it’s the student’s comfort in forming his or speech that should come first), rapport with students, and providing the opportunity for students to give more than one right answer to a prompt or question.

The original issue was that Durst was looking for ways to increase speech production among her students, and to see if the activities she used were effective in accomplishing this. But what I found most intriguing and the biggest takeaway was that often, what’s really going on in the classroom (data) does not necessarily match our perceptions of what is happening. Often times we are hypercritical of ourselves, especially those of us who are new to teaching. So when we think we’re only hearing noise, perhaps we are really hearing breakthroughs in language learning.

If you’ve ever done action research in your classroom, please tell us about it! See y’all tomorrow bright and early at TESOL!