Name Fitriana Nur Azizah ▪ Subject & Class Qualitative Research on TEFL 6D

Task: Chapter Report : Action Research

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ACTION RESEARCH

What’s Action Research?

 Action research is productive for classroom practitioners as it focuses on issues and questions
related to immediate practice and application. It involves exploring and discovering more
about a specific issue which has significance for a teacher in relation to his or her own
classroom and students.
 Action research is an approach that involves both action and research. However, the term can
also be puzzling as it contains two ideas that do not seem to sit comfortably together – action
and research.
 The action usually involves putting deliberate practical changes or ‘interventions’ in place to
improve, modify, or develop the situation.
 The research in action research involves a systematic approach to collecting information, or
data, usually using methods commonly associated with qualitative research.
 Action research is to find out more about what is going on in your own local context in order
to change or improve current practice in that situation. Thus, action research can be
contrasted with other types of research which may aim to hypothesize, describe, analyze,
explain, interpret, theorize, and generalize – but not to make immediate changes in specific
teaching practices within the research context.
 Kemmis and McTaggart (1986, pp. 11–14) describe the essential stages as a self-reflective
action research cycle of planning, action, observation, and reflection, where you:
1) Identify a focus area of your practice that presents a ‘puzzle’, problem, or question and
plan strategies to change or improve the situation.
2) Collect information systematically about this focus area.
3) Analyze and reflect on what the data you have collected are telling you about the
situation.
4) Act as necessary again to change or improve the situation.

Why Use Action Research in Applied Linguistics Research?

 Action research an engaging way to refresh their teaching and extend themselves
professionally. It is highly contextualized within the personal daily workplace and provides a
way to open up, question, and investigate the realities of the teaching situation.
 The methods used for collecting data can be ‘doubled up’ with information often readily
available to a classroom teacher, thus allowing you access to new ways of thinking about
classroom issues that are a natural part of your work.
 Action research actively encourages dialogue with colleagues who may be facing the same
teaching dilemmas and wanting to share their thoughts and ideas with others. Working
collaboratively in a research partnership or groups offers you forms of professional
development that draw on your own practical theories, and professional and personal
resources.
  Action research offers professional insights that are more immediately applicable and relevant
to their classrooms than externally structured workshops or courses that deliver research
findings or advocate particular teaching approaches in a top-down way.
 Action research by language teachers also contributes to the body of practice and theory that
the field requires for deeper knowledge about effective English language teaching.

Collecting The Data

 Observational methods and nonobservational methods. These approaches assist researchers

to gain knowledge from an insider (or emic) perspective. They come from forms of research
classically associated with sociology and ethnography.
 The methods highlighted here do not imply that action researchers avoid quantifying their
data. Depending on the data sources and how the datacollection instruments are prepared,
presenting numbers (percentages, ratings, rankings, and so on) may be part of data analysis.

Observational Nonobservational
Examples: Examples:
1) Brief notes or recorded comments 1) Questionnaires and surveys;
made by the teacher while the class is 2) Interviews;
in progress; 3) Class discussions/focus groups;
2) Audio- or video-recordings of classroom 4) Diaries, journals, and logs kept by
interaction; teacher or learners;
3) Observation by self or a colleague on 5) Classroom documents, such as
particular aspects of classroom action; materials used, samples of
4) Transcripts of classroom interactions student.
between teacher and students or
students and students;
5) Maps, layouts, or sociograms of the
classroom that trace the interactions
between students and teacher;
6) Photographs of the physical context.

Organizing and Interpreting The Data

 Data analysis strategy 1: Identifying themes and patterns.
Identifying the major themes and patterns across a body of data helps to make your data
more manageable and reduce them in such a way that these themes can be
presented in your findings.
 Data analysis strategy 2: Coding verbal data.
Data collected from recorded interviews can be transcribed and then coded for the key
topics that emerge. Transcription is very time-consuming, and after listening to your
recordings, you will need to decide how much to transcribe and which parts of the data to
focus on. Typically, coding involves reading over or listening to the data several times, aiming
to arrive at the key categories.
 Data analysis strategy 3: Narrating your observations.
1) Chronological – reducing them into a form that recounts the main events (the story of
the process over time).
2) Selective – picking out unusual, special, or critical events that show how/why the
direction of the research changed (the story of key incidents).
 3) Particular – focusing on particular students, activities, classroom materials and their
uses, or locations and describing their roles in the research (the story of a specific case).
4) Conceptual – focusing on issues or decisions that arose as you observed and took notes
on your practice (the story of your developing understandings and teaching theories).
 Data analysis strategy 4: Quantifying the data.
1) To count the number of times particular incidents, behaviors, or utterances occur.
2) Description of your research, data presentation, description, and commentary needs to
be followed by interpreting the essence or meaning of your research, which could
involve developing personal theories about its meaning in your classroom or for your
teaching, and how it might have resonance for teachers elsewhere.

Presenting The Findings

 There are numerous ways you can disseminate your research to others:

Spoken presentations Written presentations

1) Brief informal descriptions to other
teachers at staff meetings or teacher
workshops;
2) Reports at project meetings to
colleagues, research collaborators,
mentors, ‘critical friends’;
3) Project summaries to fellow students,
colleagues, or peers;
4) Formal presentations to audiences at
conferences or seminars focusing on
teacher research.
1) Web-postings on your own, your
peergroup, or general teacher research
sites;
2) Poster presentations at workshops,
seminars, conferences (often
accompanied by informal discussion
with a passing audience);
3) Contributions to newsletters (local,
regional, national, international);
4) Submissions to a published collection of
teacher action research (often following
guidelines or a template);
5) Submissions to an action research-
focused journal (following the guidelines
and submission procedures).

Improving The Quality Of Action Research

 To strengthen trustworthiness in action research is through triangulation. By using several

data-collection techniques and comparing what they tell you, you can determine whether
your analysis and findings are well supported across different sources of information.
 Taking the data back to the participants and asking whether your interpretations fit with what
they intended to say or do.
 Other ways of increasing action research quality are: to follow LeCompte and Goetz’s (1984)
advice that ‘the design of the study should fit lines of inquiry’ (p. 245); to consider the changing
dimensions and stages of the study; to describe the context in sufficient detail for the specific
circumstances to be well understood; and to be as objective and unbiased as possible by
drawing on the data rather than your assumptions.