Developing teachers’ conceptions of research

Abstract

Despite being most often associated with academia, research is a valuable enterprise for classroom practitioners. It is both a means by which they can grow as professionals and improve learning and teaching. However, teachers are bound to feel alienated from research if they conceive of it as an activity that exclusively belongs to the academic domain. This alienation is inimical to language education given that teachers are at the chalkface. Their knowledge of the subject, context and learners most probably makes them ideally placed to develop insider insights into what happens in the black box of the classroom and the reasons for these events. The impact of these insights risks being blunted by a narrow understanding of research foisted upon teachers by the academic community that studies the classroom from an outside perspective. Limited conceptions of research might lead some teachers to think of it as something necessarily involving a hypothesis, statistics or in-depth analysis. However, in essence, research is the process of asking a question about something you are interested in or puzzled by, and then finding an answer to that question. This view is shared by Christine Coombe, who says that ‘research is basically finding out something that I either have an interest in and I didn’t know about before, or just learning something new about my students’ (as cited in Xerri 2017a: 36). What this implies is that research is a democratic and inclusive activity that belongs to all those teachers who are curious about language education and the events in their classrooms. However, if teachers wish to engage with and in research, they might require support with their conceptualisation of research.