Abstract
Language Teaching Research (LTR) is one of the only top-tier academic journals in the broader field of Applied Linguistics/TESOL that has a long-standing sub-section devoted solely to practitioner research. What makes articles published in this sub-section unique is that they have been authored by teachers or teacher educators conducting research on their own practices, exposing their own puzzles/struggles, trying out alternative ways of being a teacher or teacher educator in their unique professional worlds, and offering insights into how the activity of practitioner research transforms how they think about themselves, their students, and their work. Authors draw on a range of methodological approaches often found under the umbrella term ‘practitioner research’, including action research, exploratory action research, teacher research, exploratory practice, case study, and narrative inquiry. As the editor of this sub-section since 2013, it is my honor to introduce the first special issue of LTR devoted entirely to Practitioner and professional development research.
Set within a two-semester instructional unit called Starting language research Mark Wyatt and Carmen Pasamar Marquez trace how they attempt to guide a group of undergraduate applied language students through their initial entrée into conducting language research. Grounded in exploratory action research, they draw from their own reflective journal entries and student interview data to articulate an initial ‘puzzle’ of how to make the unit relevant and meaningful to students learning German, French, and Spanish, while also chronicling the various ways in which they supported students as they engaged in collaborative inquiry-based language research. The project enabled them to uncover students’ preconceived notions about language research, assisted them as they explored relevant researchable topics, helped them scaffold a range of practical research activities, supported their attempts to build students’ technical skills of working with language data, and helped them not only evaluate the quality of students’ final projects but highlight the intellectual value of having language students engage in language research. Their project provides insights into how engagement in exploratory action research enabled them to act as productive researchers and learners of teaching while simultaneously enabling their students to act as productive researchers and learners of language.
Also under the framework of exploratory practice, Yuanshan Chen traces the development of her Taiwanese English language students’ pragmatic awareness through direct instruction in email literacy. In doing so, she not only details how her instructional stages (setting the context, modeling, joint construction, and independent construction) gave her insight into how her students were learning but she also gained interesting insights into how exploratory practice can contribute to the quality of classroom life. Drawing on teacher-constructed questionnaires, class discussions, student presentations and pre- and post-instruction student-generated emails, her findings suggest that her students developed greater pragmatic awareness and positive attitudes towards instruction on email literacy. Her goal, in future instructional projects, is to enable her students to use a repertoire of formal and informal variants of email for different social and professional circumstances and purposes.
In Trouble in paradise, Richard Pinner provides a carefully articulated rationale for his pedagogical choice to implement self-assessments in his daily language teaching practice. His narrative inquiry chronicles his cognitive and emotional struggles to manage a particularly challenging student, Lago, who fails to see the value of this practice or conform to the spirit of the practice and, in fact, openly defies not only the practice but also the instructor’s authority. Yet, Pinner uses this incident as a means of not only exploring his own practice but also making significant changes in his practices to enhance ‘the quality of classroom life’ for himself and his students. Pinner’s narrative inquiry speaks to all language teachers who have struggled with students like Lago, particularly the ones who, for often legitimate reasons, do not see the value of what teachers are attempting to do. How teachers respond to such students can be just as instructive to the teacher as a learner of teaching as it may be to the student of language.
Seyyedeh Fahimeh Parsaiyan’s self-reflective narrative inquiry is a beautifully written and theoretically sound articulation of an experienced language teacher’s professional journey to remake her teaching and herself as a teacher. Her struggle is a common one: how to teach in ways that respect the rich qualities of language as it is used to live and be in the world while facing life in English language classrooms that are dominated by life-less and, for many teachers and students, meaningless commercial textbooks and/or mandated curriculum. She reports on curricular innovations that she crafted, tried out, and then reflected on in order to bring renewed life to her teaching and renewed interest in language learning to her students. The fact that these attempts invoked strong emotions (for both the teacher and her students) is normal, expected, but often ignored when researchers write about curricular innovation. Her project is highly relevant to practitioners who might like to try similar innovations with their students, as it is just as important to know how these attempts feel as well as how they play out in instructional activities.
Finding time to engage in meaningful professional development is challenging for busy teachers of second language (L2). Yet, in her Tiny talks narrative inquiry, Rebecca Zoshak illustrates just how meaningful brief conversations about L2 teaching between colleagues can be. Transcripts of a series of ‘walk and talk’ exchanges as well as her own post-reflections, expose how engagement in brief oral narratives created mediational spaces for her to process her emotions, to make sense of theory in terms of her own classroom practices, and to reconcile her dual identity as both a second semester L2 teacher and an MA TESL graduate student. Invoking a Vygotskian sociocultural theoretical perspective on teacher learning, her narrative inquiry illustrates the transformative power of engagement in narrative activity in shaping how L2 teachers began to think about and enact their L2 teaching. When recognized as a legitimate and potentially transformative professional development activity, ‘tiny talks’ allow teachers to utilize their teaching experiences, emotional struggles, and personal reflections to rethink not only what they thought but also shift how they come to think about and enact their roles and identities as students, as learners of teaching, and as teachers.
In addition to these five practitioner research articles, we offer two articles that focus specifically on teacher professional development: one an invited descriptive literature review on practices that encourage teacher reflection, and the other a case study of the impact, or lack thereof, of short term teacher professional development on teachers’ L2 writing instruction.
Thomas Farrell operationalizes reflective practice according to five levels/stages of teacher reflection. His framework shifts the analytic lens of reflection according to the following: philosophy (teacher-as-person), principles (assumptions, beliefs, and conceptions of teaching and learning), theory (theories-in-use), practice (actual teaching), and beyond practice (sociocultural and political consequences). He applies this framework to 116 research articles that focus on practices that encourage teacher reflection from 58 journals over a 5-year period. His results are overwhelmingly positive; clearly, teachers, whether reflecting on their identities, beliefs, theories, or their own teaching do recognize the developmental value and transformative potential in the activities of reflection. His review leaves open the sticky questions of whether teacher reflection leads to improved quality of teaching or greater gains in student learning and second language acquisition, calling for future reviews to address these all important issues.
Icy Lee, Pauline Mark, and Anne Burns tackle the thorny issue of the impact, or lack thereof, of professional development experiences on the classroom practices of two secondary teachers of English as a foreign language in Hong Kong. Focusing specifically on innovative written corrective feedback strategies that both teachers had been exposed to in a 20-hour teacher education course and a one-day professional development workshop, while well intended, both teachers described failed attempts at implementing and sustaining these strategies within the institutional context in which they worked. While exposing the limited impact of short-term professional development on teachers’ classroom practices, the stories of these two teachers highlights the institutional constraints (school rules, limited power of teachers, lack of collegial support, teacher appraisal, and student resistance) that all teachers face when attempting to implement innovative practices.
It is my hope that this special issue will highlight the powerful nature of practitioner and professional development research for those who conduct it and for those who read it.