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Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 6; November 03
A Modest Proposal: from Research to Inquiry
Alan Maley, Canterbury, UK
The Problem
Theory/Research v.Practice
Teachers as researchers
Theory-Research Nexus
A Modest Proposal
Research/Inquiry
Why?
Who?
How?
Conclusion
The whole English Teaching enterprise continues to be bedevilled by what is usually termed the Theory-Practice debate. Should what we do be informed primarily by 'hard' research evidence of how languages are learned, and by principles deriving from applied linguistic theorising, or should it be left to the pragmatic wisdom of those who actually teach it? The debate is largely inconclusive, and divisive in the sense that it polarises us into two camps – the 'Theorists' and the 'Practitioners'.
There is undeniably an essential difference between what researchers (or 'theorists') do and what teachers do. Penny Ur, among others, has drawn our attention to the different agendas and priorities of these two discourse communities. For researchers and theorists, the main priority is to get published, since this is the principal avenue for professional promotion. For teachers, the main priority is to survive with self-esteem intact and a modicum of professional satisfaction at a job well done.
It is also clear that, for many classroom teachers at least, the products of research and theorising have no immediate relevance to their day to day practice. Neither are they easily accessible. They appear in expensive and relatively obscure publications. And they tend to be written in arcane and technical language which is largely incomprehensible to the outside reader. For the hard-pressed teacher there is little time or energy left over from the demands of their jobs to undertake the exegesis of this mountain of paper.
One way out of this problem has been to conflate the roles of researcher and teacher. The 'teacher-researcher' movement, documented by Allwright and Bailey (1991), Nunan (1996), and many others over the past 15 years or so has somewhat narrowed the divide between the two communities. In this perspective, the location of research is shifted to the classroom and the events which occur there. And the persons who engage in the research activity are concurrently engaged in the activity of teaching.
There remain a number of problems even with this new look research however.
- It is still based on the research paradigm (formulation of research questions/hypotheses, collection of data, analysis, results and conclusions), even though the fashion has moved somewhat from a quantitative to a qualitative focus.
- And for all its focus on the teacher, it is normally undertaken in a wider academic context (eg as part of an academic course of study such as an MA, under the supervision of non-teacher academics, or as part of a wider programme of research organised by a university or other body.) If successful as a classroom researcher, the likelihood is that the teacher will migrate away from teaching and be absorbed in the academic discourse community. (It is rare indeed for migration to be in the other direction – from researcher to teacher. The reasons are self-evident: higher prestige, fewer classroom hours, better remuneration etc.) If unsuccessful or dissatisfied, the teacher will probably close her mind to the possibility of ever undertaking classroom research again – remembering the experience as over-demanding in terms of time and effort, and as ultimately unrewarding. In other words, relatively few 'ordinary' classroom teachers are likely to be engaged in classroom research.
Before making my modest proposal, it may be helpful to unpick the several strands making up what we mean when we refer to 'Theory' (as opposed to Practice).
Generally, we seem to conflate theoretical speculation and assertion with research. By theoretical speculation, I mean the careful examination of the pedagogical process undertaken by leading thinkers in our field, such as Henry Widdowson, Guy Cook, Christopher Brumfit, Earl Stevick, N.S.Prabhu and a host of others. Such speculative thinking has, among other things, given rise to the current emphasis on Communicative Language Teaching. (Lightbown 2000) It may rely on research conducted by others, but this is not a necessary part of the process.
Research includes the careful analysis of data in order to reach firm and generalisable conclusions. Currently there are three main strands of research in our field. The first is SLA research, which aims to show precisely how we acquire both first and second languages through careful, controlled experimentation and case studies. The second is Corpus research, in which large quantities of natural language are processed and analysed with the aid of powerful and rapid computer programmes. The results yield information of great use to compilers of dictionaries, coursebook writers, and to language teachers. The third is Classroom research, already mentioned above.
Clearly, some kinds of 'Theory' are more useful and comprehensible to teachers than others, but I think it is fair to say that the quantity, complexity and obscurity of much of the above nexus makes it intimidating for most teachers. What is perhaps more significant is that, by making them feel that, as teachers, they are somehow not quite complete unless they are involved with research, they lose self-esteem and develop feelings of guilt, inadequacy and incompetence. Such feelings may sometimes be masked by expressions of antipathy to 'Theory' as a lot of rubbish with no possible relevance to them.
It must be clear that I believe the attempt to include teachers in the theory-making process through classroom research has been less successful than might have been hoped. One possible reason for this is the insistence on the word 'research', which carries with it the intimidating baggage referred to above. If this puts teachers off, as I believe it often does, can we not find another term with which to replace it? After all, we do want teachers to be curious about and involved in their teaching: this is part of the teacher-development process. Rather than insisting on Classroom Research, why not encourage the more modest activity of Inquiry? Being in a constantly inquiring state of mind would be less technically demanding and theoretically threatening, yet equally valuable professionally.
But what do I mean by Inquiry? One aspect is the way we formulate questions about our work. 'I wonder why…?', 'What would happen if…?', 'Could I find another way of doing that?' etc. To address questions such as these there is no compelling need to undertake research projects. They may involve instead any of a number of other processes: checking information on google.com, reading articles in some of the more accessible teacher magazines and journals (such as ETp, MET, ELTJ, The Teacher Trainer, etc), keeping a journal, setting some time aside each day for thinking things over, going to teacher workshops/conferences, talking informally to other teachers (what Naoko Aoki terms 'professional conversations' (2002)), exchanging letters/e-mails with students, etc.
What then distinguishes Research from Inquiry? In the table below I have tried to outline some key characteristics which I shall go on to gloss:
WHY
| Theory-building | Problem-solving |
| Future value | Immediate value |
| Academic | Pragmatic |
| Global | Local |
| Commitment to Research Community | Commitment to Learners |
| Sense of certainty | Sense of Plausibility |
WHO?
| By outsiders (Them) | By insiders (Us) |
| By 'experts' | By practitioners |
| 'impersonal' | Personal |
| Top-down | Bottom-up |
HOW? (How long?)
| Closed-ended | Open-ended |
| Finite | Continuing |
| Narrow-focus | Holistic |
| Generalisable | Particularised |
| Segregated | Integrated |
| Scientific | Intuitive |
| Epochal | Incremental |
Why?
What are the differing reasons/justifications for carrying out Research or Inquiry?
Despite the recent move towards classroom research, the research enterprise as a whole is still overwhelmingly in the hands of the academic discourse community. The purpose of research is to discover truth, and to build theories based upon it. It is about pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge by offering better, more certain facts and interpretations. These will be of global reach, not confined to a narrow context. It has no need to render account to teachers or learners.
By contrast, the main reason to pursue what I am calling Inquiry, is to solve immediate problems, or answer urgent personally-relevant questions. It is essentially pragmatic therefore, and necessarily local in scope, It has no ambitions to formulate theories which apply to all. Its primary commitment is to learners, and perhaps to other teachers with a similar problem or question. Rather than seeking a sense of certainty, it is tentative and provisional, attempting to find out how new information or insights can be fitted into the individual's frame of beliefs as to what is plausible and feasible for her at a given moment. Prabhu (1990) has called this the 'teacher's sense of plausibility'.
Research is almost always conducted by outsiders to the situation, by 'them'. The researcher is typically an expert, trained (or training) in how to do research. Necessarily such an outsider has a relatively impersonal relationship with the context he/she is operating in. In fact, impartiality is often held up as a virtue. To be too personally-involved would pollute the data. The researcher's agenda then is imposed from above on the situation being investigated.
With Inquiry, the person doing it is necessarily an insider: 'us' or more frequently, just 'me'. He/she is not an expert, except in the sense of knowing the context from the inside. The strength of this position is that it is intensely personal: feelings are at least as important as facts. It works from the bottom, the lived experience of the observer/inquirer.
It is necessary for research to be finite, to have closure, however provisional that closure may be. Without an endpoint in view, it cannot report results. The scientific aspect of research is manifest in its compulsion to measure things, as far as possible ensuring that what is measured is significant. It also tends to have a narrow-focus. Research students are constantly being enjoined to 'narrow your focus' (Szesztay 2003). Unless they do this, it is difficult to come to unambiguous conclusions. They must somehow ringfence the phenomenon they wish to study, to segregate it, otherwise too many variables may put their results in doubt. This 'scientific' approach does however have a paradoxical result. The more carefully the research controls for variables, the less likely it is that the context will be replicated elsewhere, the more unique it is, so the less generalisable it becomes. Catch 22. Given that research hopes to reveal 'epochal', that is highly significant and generalisable conclusions, this seems like a serious defect in the paradigm.
By contrast, Inquiry is open-ended and continuing. Nothing is ever decided for all time; everything is necessarily provisional as the teacher-inquirer moves between different classes and situations, and confronts new problems. It focuses on a holistic understanding. As Margit Szesztay puts it, “I wanted to arrive at the kind of knowledge which allows me to understand the 'interconnectedness' of the various aspects of facilitating discussions.' (op.cit.p8) It is particularised since everyone who undertakes it does so in their own personal context, so it is necessarily integrated into the whole of their experience. There is little or no concern with measuring things in a scientific way. The focus is rather on noticing things, and connecting them: an intuitive process. This slow piecing together of understandings is incremental: a series of small steps with no ambition to make a major impact on the field at large. It is a modest undertaking, like my proposal!
I have suggested that research may not be the most appropriate form of investigation for teachers. (I do not, of course, suggest they should never undertake research.) Generally, research and theorising, which are the province of a quite different discourse community, tend to intimidate teachers, who, in any case frequently find them of limited relevance to their own professional, teacherly concerns.
My proposal is therefore that we recognise the value and legitimacy of research and theory-building within its own domain. But we should not expect it to have any necessary or close link with the activity of teaching.
Likewise I propose that we valorise the activity of informal, personal inquiry into teaching by teachers, and relieve them of the feeling that they ought to be engaging in a form of academic research. I have suggested that by calling some forms of classroom investigation 'classroom research' we may be giving teachers status – but not in their own terms. All too often I believe we may be loading such activity with a false necessity to prove itself in others' terms, rather than in one's own. Classroom research is not the only valid way of knowing. Let us take pride in our competence as inquiring teachers, rather than pretending to be something we are not.
References
Allwright, Richard and Kathy Bailey. 1991. Focus on the Classroom CUP
Aoki, Naoko. 2002. An alternative way for teachers to develop. The Teacher Trainer. Vol .16, No.2. Summer 2002: 10-16.
Lightbown, Patsy M. 2000. Anniversary article: Classroom SLA Research and Second Language Teaching. Applied Linguistics 21/4: 431-462
Nunan, David. 1996. Language Teaching and Research. In Nunan and Griffee (eds) Classroom Teachers and Classroom Research. JALT publication. Tokyo.
Prabhu, N.S. 1990. There is no best method – why? In TESOL Quarterly 24/2: 161-176
Szesztay, Margit. 2003. Doing research: a license to ignore? In IATEFL Issues. June-July 2003, Issue 17: 8
