Pre-talk: Mission Statement
By Scott Donald
This blog has been published in conjunction with a talk I’m debuting at the ACEIA-Malaga conference this weekend. The talk, ‘A little less aimless conversation, a little more action research’, focuses on speaking skills; however, it aims to look at the wider subject of research and English language teaching.
Originally, I was planning to do a straightforward talk on speaking skills. But, while investigating the role of error correction in speaking activities, I was pointed in the direction of articles written by the Second Language Acquisition expert Rod Ellis. In the first paper I read (Ellis, 2013), he describes a gap between what he calls Language Pedagogy and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research, i.e. the teachers and the boffins. Before I knew it, the straightforward talk had evolved, and error correction was all but forgotten.
In a number of papers, Ellis and others suggest that the realities of teaching are not necessarily the main priority for researchers. Likewise, teachers may find SLA research impractical and difficult to apply to their teaching, or they may simply find academic writing inaccessible. I asked a number of my teaching colleagues and they seemed to back up what Ellis was saying, as does other formal research (Zeuli & Tiezzi,1993).
In one paper, Ellis recommends some excellent ideas on incorporating research into a teacher education programme and different approaches on how we might bridge the gap (Ellis, 2010). As a big fan of science and teaching, I was immediately convinced it was a worthwhile cause, and that maybe it could be helped by a grassroots approach. And in fact, this is something Ellis advocates, the idea of teachers conducting their own research through things like Action Research. That was when I thought of using the Elvis song as the title, and then there was no turning back!
For the talk, i decided to stick to the focus of speaking skills and I covered the following areas:
- Research and teaching (Where I would explain the gap and try to convince the teachers that research was not as boring or as inaccessible as it sounds. I would also introduce the idea of Action Research here.)
- What do Language Pedagogy and SLA theory suggest to us about the speaking skill? (The main part of the talk and the most practical, where I would give them activities taken from research I had uncovered.)
- Spoken Grammar
- Preparation/Wait Time
- Information Gaps
- Pairwork
3. Other tips for effective speaking activities (An attempt to jam in a few more tips from Language Pedagogy and introduce the idea that we don’t necessarily have enough research on them. Which would bring me on to…)
4. Over to you…(Where I would try to convince the teachers that they could be the ones to do their own research and investigations into these conclusions about what makes a good speaking skill.)
I was happy enough with the content of the talk (and now I just have to hope I don’t mess up presenting it on Saturday.), but I felt that something was missing. It felt like I was encouraging people to go out and give it a try, but with no attempt at a follow up. That’s when the idea for this blog came up. I was intrigued by the look and feel of Medium. I also liked the fact that they refer to the blogs as ‘publications’ and the posts as ‘stories’ — something a bit different.
So, without further ado, here is the mission statement.
This publication aims to bridge the gap between research and teaching by providing a place for teachers to share:
- Research they’ve found related to Second Language Acquisition, or research from any discipline that they think is relevant to language teaching. The aim of this is to encourage better practice, give us good ideas and dispel any bad ideas, (e.g. so-called Learning Styles.)
- Investigations and experiments they’ve done in their own classrooms. These could be related to research they’ve read; or it could be related to a problem they’ve identified in their classroom which they have then investigated (Action Research). It could simply be something in their classroom they’ve chosen to investigate that they’d like to know more about (Exploratory Practice). As this publication is designed to be as grassroots as possible, there are no expectations of academic style or conventions. The aim of this is to make good research as accessible and relevant as possible, while drawing from the unparalleled resource that is a teacher’s experience.
So if you are interested in contributing and posting something, please get in touch. Around this time next week, I’ll put up another post reflecting on the talk, and I’ll share some practical activities from the talk that I’ve used in class.
(Edit: The follow up post is now available https://medium.com/a-little-more-action-research/post-talk-112abb7fa00d#.8tt1pj2h2)
References
Ellis, R. (2010) A principled approach to incorporating second language acquisition research into a teacher education programme. Reflections on English Language Teaching, Vol. 9, №1, pp. 1–17. Available at: http://nus.edu.sg/celc/research/books/relt/vol9/no1/01to18_ellis.pdf
Ellis, R. (2013) Corrective feedback in teacher guides and SLA. Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research 1(3), (Oct., 2013) 1–18. Available at: http://www.urmia.ac.ir/sites/www.urmia.ac.ir/files/Article%201.pdf
Zeuli, J.S. & Tiezzi, L.J. (1993). Creating contexts to change teachers’ beliefs about the influence of research . National Center for Research on Teaching and Learning, Report #93–1
