RESEARCH IN ELT CAR

RESUME
Arranged by :
MUCHAMMAD ICHWAN RH
20400114049

English Education Department

Tarbiyah and Teaching Faculty
Alauddin State Islamic University of Makassar

Chapter 1 : Teachers in action

Research in language teaching must be predicated on an understanding of a wide
range of contextual variables that will interact with and even determine both
research perspectives and research methodology.
The professional world of teachers encompasses many and varied attitudes,
behaviours, expectations, actors, possibilities, pressures, and constraints. Any
specific research profile will therefore inevitably be linked at the least to questions
such as who initiates the research; who carries it out; how if at all its outcomes are
reported; its content and focus; where it takes place; how many people are
involved; what the control and decision points are; its timescale; its funding source;
and its possible applications.
To understand about patterns of research, it will be explained based on Figure 1.1.
1. Research
By Whom
Research can be provided by external agents and teachers, the two of
them have a different person that provides a research. External
Agents are divided to be a ministry and researchers . these agents
may alternatively be university-based researchers who visit an
institution just to collect data, initial formulation and subsequent
analysis and write-up being done elsewhere. Meanwhile, teachers are
often the objects of such research rather than participants, and may
well not have sight of the final outcome. Teachers could be as
directed, individuals, in groups, and participants.

Focus
Research focuses on needs specifications, classrooms, individuals or
groups, institution or management, learning styles, teaching
behaviours, language, programmes or materials, preparing for action,
recording change. These aspects determine what research will be
chosen by reseachers.

Goals
Every research have a goals that will be reached during research.
These goals are change and innovation, personal and institutional
development, appraisal, knowledge and understanding, public and
disseminated, and private.

Location

When the researhers is going to research, they will determine the

location that have been chosen. These locations can be within
institution, outside own situation, ministry, and university.

Attitudes
The attitudes in research are positive and negative in a teachers ,
institutions, ministries, learners that can affect in your research.

Chapter 2 : The teacher

researcher in focus
Brumfit and Mitchell, in their introductory chapter to a collection of papers
that takes very broad view of research possibilities in language classrooms,
make the following assertion: there is ap particularly strong contradictory
pull [between research and teaching] in that research is a type of
contemplation while teaching is a type of action (1989: 10). This is a
standard and much-cited polarization (and incidentally represents a view to
which the Brumfit and Mitchell volume does not on the whole subscribe): it
places the terms action and contemplation (or reflection), teaching and
research, in two quite distinct and incompatible universe.
These advantages are clearly set out in Beasly and
Nunan, 1989: 17-18) and are cited (almost) in full here:

Riordan (quoted in

It begins with and builds on the knowledge that teachers have

already accumulated.
It focuses on the Immediate concerns of classroom teachers
It matches the subtle organic process of classroom life.
It builds on the natural processes of evaluation and research
which teachers carry out daily.
It bridges the gap between understanding and action by merging
the role of researcher and practitioner.
It sharpens teachers critical awareness through observation,
recording and analysis of classroom events.
It helps teacher better articulate teaching and learning processes
to their colleagues and interested community members.
It bridges the gap between theory and practice.

Some key notions explored the development of teacher research in English

as a foreign language. The contrast between action and reflection was
shown to be only apparent, and Schons resolution of this in the concept of
reflecion in action was taken ro be a keystone supporting the whole
venture. Teacher-initiated research inn this tradition was seen to have
established and venerable roots in mainstream education, and both the
advantages and some dangers of this approach were aired :
On the minus side:

The unhelpful growth of oppositions between research by teachers

and by researchers
The difficult of evaluating its ultimate effectiveness as an agent for
either personal or institutional change.

Chapter 3 : What is research ?

In other fields , the term research has other senses. One could draw a crude
(and probably ultimately invalid) distinction between two senses of the world
research in the ordinary language. In the first sense, the outcomes of
research is the establishment, publicizing, or utilization of something that
somebody - not the researcher ot the person commissioning it already
knows. In the second sense, the outcome is knowledge nobody had before.
This is the general aim of academic research. The world research is used in
different fields in one or other of these senses, and in some fields in both
senses. Some examples of the first sense are following : Fiction, journalism,
police work, business and commerce, medical research, science and
technology, and language teaching.
Basic research is often described as research without immediate practical
utility, driven only by the advancement of theory, whereas applied research
involves some kind of applicability. For Sharwood Smith, constitute an answer
to the question What does second language research have to say to
language teachers. Applied research may develop along at least three
different kinds of path, all of which have been used in language education at
some time :
1. The application of research results and the theory they support to the
solution of language teaching problems.

2. A second view of applied research suggests that what is applied is not

so much the products of existing research but the methodology of
obtaining those results.
3. Yet a third view argues that applied research - which should be
distinguished from action research (cohen and manion, 1989;218)
develops its own body of knowledge and theory building for its
particular set of problems.
Research is systematic inquiry that investigates hypotheses, suggests new
interpretations of data or texts, and poses new questions for future research
to explore.
Research consists of :

Asking a question that nobody has asked before;

Doing the necessary work to find the answer; and
Communicating the knowledge you have acquired to a larger audience.

Chapter 4 : Principles and

problems: what
makes good
research?
There are 13 features of good research that the researcher use in a research :
First, there are features to do with the initiation and undertaking of research the - interest,
originality, specificity, and publication or dissemintion, of the research questions and findings.
Second, there are features of the design and methodology of the research the sensitivity,
objektivity, validity, and reliability of the methods chosen, and the key principle of falsifiability,
which applies to hypotheses, conclusions, and theories equally.
Third, there are features concerning the application to other situations, of practical exploitation,
use in effecting change and innovation, and of further or parallel research replicability,
generalizability and utility.
Last, there is the question of the ethics of research and how the participants rights are effected,
how both the quality of the research data and the confidentiality of disclosures made by
respondents may be protected.

Thus different research methods serve different kinds of problems and different purposes.
However, that is not purely relativist position, for there are general criteria. How do the various
research traditions compare? Hopkins view is as follows (1993: 171) :
Criteria such as validity, reliability, generalizability, are necessary if teacher-researchers
are to escape the sentimental anecdote that often replaces statistical research designs in
education, and gives teacher-research such a bad name. Enquiry, self-monitoring, and
teacher-research need to establish standards and criteria that are applicable to their area
of activity, rather than assume (and then reject) criteria designed for different problems.
These features help the researcher to determine what research is going to be, the features
determine the design and methodology of the research, and concerning the application to other
situations. As Hopkins view is as follows Criteria are necessary if teacher-researchers are to
escape the sentimental anecdote that often replaces statistical research designs in education, and
gives teacher-research such a bad name. However, given our earlier descriptions of different,
even competing paradigms, it should be clear that each criterion is open to different possible
interpretations, and this we have tried to draw out in the course of the discussion.

Chapter 5 : Generating Research

Kenji Matsuda has now been on a six-month language development and teacher training
programme in the UK. During his stay he was required (by the Ministry) to write a project
directly addressing some aspect of his own situation. He chose to work on the methodology of
vocabulary teaching. Now back home , he is linking his project work with everyday reality by
analyzing the set textbook and tabulating its methods of introducing and reinforcing
vocabulary, and by selectively introducing new techniques then testing his class at regular
intervals to see which methods encourage greater retention. He plans to persuade colleagues to
try out something similar, and possibly to discover whether different methods, including use of
the mother tongue, are suitable at different proficiency levels.
Anna Garcia is a Columbian university teacher of English with many years classroom
experience. The main part of her job is to teach reading skills to undergraduates in different
subject areas. Although the materials used are relatively up-to-date in the sense of incorporating
current views on the nature of comprehension, this teacher feels that her students reading skills
in English remain at a rudimentary level. She suspects that this may be related to, though not
necessarily caused by, inefficient reading skills in Spanish, and in turn to the fact that languages

is typically taught in the schools as a grammatical system. She has managed to get a scholarship
for PhD to research this issue in depth. Her plans include an investigation of what other
researchers have found, the development of instruments to measure reading efficiency in two
languages, and an analysis of pedagogic practice.
These teachers have different choices to test their ideas and develop their own research
programmes, and how those research activities relate to their normal professional lives. The point
was made that just as different groups have different ideas of theory. So they have different
attitudes to desirable degree of precision in the initial research questions.

Chapter 6 : Definitions and

overview
In the three-stage model of course design associated with the work of Richard and Rodgers
(1986, though they based their discussion on earlier work by Anthony), the model is intended to
show how theory becomes practice through a process of increasing specificity and
concretization. The levels are Approach, Design, and Procedure. Approach refers to general
views theories- of language and learning on which the next stage is based. Design is the stage
at which axioms at the first level are converted into syllabus and materials construction, and
Procedure refers to the practical techniques used in the classroom. Research, too, is often
written about in a comparable way, a sequential distinction being made between interdependent
levels.
Principle Method Technique
It is useful to set these alongside the more explicitly teacher-oriented work from mainstream
education (for example Hopkins, 1993; Nixon, 1981; Walker, 1985), as well as standard
reference works such as Gohen and Maion (1989). A typical profile of methods coverage would
include at least the following, in no particular order:

Questionnaires
Interview
Observation (direct and recorded)
Field notes, diaries, documents
Case study
Experiments
Think-aloud
Numerical analysis

A principle is a law in a research that observed in nature or the way that system is constructed..
Any research should be systematic, organized , and objective. Method is the way to support the
research to be a good or bad research. While, technique is used in performing research
operations such as making observations, recording data, techniques of processing data and the
like.
Researcher can choose data collection techniques that will be dependent upon practical
considerations. Each data has a advantages and disadvantages and it will depend on many
factors.

Chapter 7 : Observing Language

classrooms
Observation, as it stands, is a monolithic label, a broad and even amorphous umbrella term
subsuming many and varied purposes and interpretations. Hopkins (1993), for example gives a
positive sense of this breadth of application by describing it is a pivotal activity with a crucial
role to play in classroom research, teachers personal-professional growth, and school
development as a whole. Observation with its associated techniques is also often embedded in a
larger-scale research plan as one method among others, when perhaps a variety of data sources is
appropriate.
The importance of systematicity was neatly put by Fanselow (1977) who devised a particular
coding scheme called FOCUS , when he pointed out that we all see different features in the same
scene and therefore give different accounts, in his view serious investigation needed agreement
between observers on the basic categories involved. So systematicity implies prior decisions
about what to record. Furthermore, it implies agreement or at least prior decisions about methods
, when to record , example :

On a regular time based (every 3 seconds, 30 seconds, 60 seconds, and so on).

Using a recognizable boundary marker-like OK-to signal a segment of a lesson
devoted to one topic
To categorize one turn of speaking at the time

Observation is used to collect data in research. The data could be in checklist and written
criteria, audios and video recordings, and notes. There are three key parameters that need to be
clarified in observation, such as the observers, the goals, and the procedures. Furthermore,
systematizing observations divided into preliminaries and systematize. The use of systematic
coding schedule is therefore very much an elaborated checklist approach. Checklist are used to
ensure that relevant steps are noticed and remembered, like a weeks shopping list or a pilots
landing checks; but since they thereby systematically reduce the raw data, interesting events in
that data that are not included on the checklist will not be noted.