Language Teacher Research Methods
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LANGUAGE TEACHER RESEARCH METHODS
INTRODUCTION
The study of language teachers is a relatively recent area of research that focuses on how teachers learn to teach, how they teach, and who they are as individuals and professionals. Over a decade ago, Richards (1990, p. 3) observed that there had been “little systematic study of second language teaching processes that could provide a theoretical basis for deriving practices in second language teacher education.” The field has developed since then and has become an important area of study in language and education. It has included methods used to study language teachers by outsiders and those used by language teachers themselves to study their own classrooms. In addition, topics have ranged from those predominantly confined to the classroom, such as action research, to studies of teachers across different settings, such as those describing teachers’ professional trajectories. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
Early forays into analyzing second-language classrooms focused on attempts to evaluate student language learning through the identification of the best method or a set of teacher behaviors. Chaudron (1988) outlined four methods of research into second-language classrooms, which are useful to consider here: (1) psychometric analysis, a quasiexperimental method that uses pre- and post-analysis of classrooms with experimental and control groups; (2) interaction analysis, an observation scheme of the social interactions in the classroom; (3) discourse analysis, an observation scheme of the linguistic interactions in the classroom; (4) ethnographic analysis, an analysis of the classroom based on interpretation, including interviews with and observations of participants. The language teacher in the first three types of analysis was viewed as transmitter of a particular method, and the focus was on teacher behaviors and student outcomes. In the fourth approach, the emphasis was more of a holistic understanding of teacher and student interactions and motivations.
K. A. King and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 10: Research Methods in Language and Education, 287–297. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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M A N K A M . VA R G H E S E
Two often-cited, early studies of second-language classrooms used mainly psychometric methods to determine student outcomes: the Pennsylvania project that attempted to compare the audio-lingual method with traditional methods by looking at the test scores of students in a secondary school in the different programs (Smith, 1970) and Politzer’s (1970) study of secondary French classrooms where the frequency of certain techniques (different types of drills) used by teachers were related to learner outcomes. A number of studies subsequently used interaction and discourse analysis (Chaudron, 1977; Fanselow, 1977; Tsui, 1985) rather than experimental studies. With the onset of communicative language teaching, many of these studies were conducted for purposes of teacher training and evalua
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