The Language Teacher
December 1999
Interview with Anne Burns and Graham Crookes
Steve Cornwell
Osaka Jogakuin Junior College
We were fortunate to be able to interview, by e-mail, two leading advocates of action research, Anne Burns, the Associate Director of the National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research (NCELtr) at Macquarie University and Graham Crookes of the Department of ESL at the University of Hawai'i. Anne has worked as a teacher and teacher educator in Wales, England, France, Kenya and Mauritius, and is the editor of Prospect: A Journal of Australian TESOL. Graham has taught English in the jungles of Borneo and in Japanese conversation schools. I hope that the interview will give you a better idea of what action research is, what it can accomplish, and how you might go about doing it in your class room.
Can you give us your favorite short definition of action research to help our readers as they work through this dialogue?
GC: I think these days I quite like the one by Carr and Kemmis that is used a lot:
Action research is simply a form of self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own practices, their understanding of these practices and the situations in which the practices are carried out. (Carr & Kemmis,1986, p. 162) With its emphasis on social context and even "justice" this takes you beyond more limited definitions.
AB: I'm not sure whether by definition you mean an oft-quoted one. If so, I'd agree with Graham that the Carr and Kemmis one is a powerfully informing one to work with. Here's another recent attempt of my own to capture what I see as the essence of action research:
Action research involves a self-reflective, systematic and critical approach to enquiry by participants who are at the same time members of the research community. The aim is to identify problematic situations or issues considered by participants to be worthy of investigation in order to bring about critically informed changes in practice. Action research is underpinned by democratic principles in that ownership of change is invested in those who conduct the research.
How did you get involved in the area of action research?
AB: The seeds of my interest go back to my early teaching career in TESOL when I realized that I knew very little about how and what I was teaching. I then undertook a Diploma course in TESOL which provided a lot of theory, and this helped although much of the theory still seemed unrelated to my classroom. This is where my interest in grounded research and the intersections between theory (which I also interpret as the underlying teaching beliefs and values teachers bring to the classroom) and practice stems from.
Action research was a term I heard increasingly in Australia in the late 1980s, probably because of action researchers such as Kemmis, McTaggart, Carr and so on at Deakin University whose work was becoming very influential in the Australian TESOL field. However, it was only after I began working at NCELtr and I became involved in a national project investigating the role of literacy development within communicative language teaching, that I began to appreciate how fundamentally teachers could utilize action research for their own professional development and at the same time be genuinely involved as a major force for changes on quite a substantial scale in organizational curriculum approaches. In this project Jenny Hammond and I and others (Hammond, Burns, Joyce, Gerot, & Brosnan, 1992) worked with groups of teachers in New South Wales and Queensland as they trailed new genre-based approaches to literacy teaching. There were cycles of workshop input and discussion over six months. It was a very exciting and challenging time.
GC: Well, my own first conscious piece of ES/FL-related research was certainly intended as action research, even if I didn't know the name at the time, because I wanted to write some materials for teaching scientific article writing (ESP), so I wanted a rhetorical structure analysis for such articles, and then I was going to write materials based on it and see if they worked. This would have been (individualist) action research because I had been teaching the writing of scientific articles to scientists in Japan, but on the basis of very inadequate resources, and I wanted to improve my practice and see if I could demonstrate (initially to my own satisfaction) what was working, what wasn't, and improve matters. I got diverted from the purely practical aspects of this investigation because it was done at a university while I was away from my teaching site, which is not an unusual story.
Why is it not unusual to get diverted from practical aspects of investigations?
GC: Well, academic research has its own foci and concerns, which overlap with but also differ from action research, particularly with regard to criteria for validity. If you are doing action research as a teacher on a problem that comes up in your own classroom, a small scale investigation, possibly even sharing your concern with your students, or quite possibly a fellow-teacher, may be sufficient to satisfy you, you and your students, or you and your colleague. Chances are you didn't achieve that satisfactory resolution by way of a controlled experimental design with an N-size of 120; nor by way of a one-year sequence of fly-on-the-wall visits to someone else's classroom and interviews with students and teachers in another school. But when you are doing a study at a university, and you are a student yourself there, you are usually subject to someone else's ideas about research methods and validity criteria, and these usually derive from academic research, and reflect the conditions under which academics do research (plenty of time and resources by comparison with the average teacher) and strictures (held to account for their findings by an international community of scholars, many of whom believe in conceptions of knowledge that are not time and culture-bound). Or if you are an academic, well, you aren't encouraged to research your own teaching and if you allow teaching to get more attention than research, you'll probably be penalized for it.
AB:I agree with Graham that there is strong pressure on academics to conduct and publish scholarly research and that substantially this is how academic achievement is judged. However, I do see some signs that academic teaching is becoming more highly regarded. For example in my own university, grants are available for innovative teaching developments, and annual outstanding teacher and supervisor awards are given. Amongst several of my colleagues there is a view growing also that good teaching and research go together and the point about doing research is that it better informs one's teaching.
Do you do other types of research?
GC: As an academic, a lot of my writings, whether empirical research or what one might call theoretical research, are prompted by my practice as a teacher educator; and particularly, by the inadequacies of my own knowledge or the existing empirical or theoretical literature or knowledge base. So in that sense a lot of what I do is oriented to action in my own area. But at the same time, quite a lot of that manifests itself in academic writings, intended for other academics. So its written forms may not be those archetypal associated with action research. Is there a genre we might call "academic action research"?
AB: Yes, although the majority of my research has been of the applied type rather than the basic or theoretical type, reflecting I suppose my own close interest in teacher education and questions of educational practice. Particular areas of interest are in classroom-based research, examining the discoursal nature of classroom interaction, and ethnographic research focusing on literacy practices inside and outside the classroom. Also a lot of the research I've done has been collaborative, working in a team of researchers to investigate a particular area. Some of this has been large-scale qualitative research, as for example in a project (Brindley, Baynham, Burns, Hammond, McKenna, & Thurstun, 1996) where we developed a national research strategy for adult ESL and literacy based on questionnaire and interview data.
Why has action research interested you more than other types of research?
GC: As an academic, I was and am in an MA(ESL) program which has a research requirement for graduation, but I was worried that many of my students were seeing research as something not helpful for their teaching. I was also worried that many teachers I encountered didn't find published research in general of help to their teaching.
AB: My job as an academic is rather unusual in that although I work in Masters programs where people have to complete research projects for graduation, I am also involved as a researcher and teacher educator in a very large national teaching organization, the AMEP, and NCELtr's role is to provide a focal point for such activities. This has required careful thinking about the kinds of research that will involve people across the organization, as well as provide continuity in processes of professional and curriculum development. It would be very easy for a research center to become/seem removed from classroom practice and we wanted to avoid this. Action research has meant that researchers and teachers can work in close partnerships each informing the other. Research gets informed by what happens in the classroom and vice versa.
As we began talking about doing this interview, Graham mentioned there is often the misperception that action research is seen as "small" research. Does small mean not rigorous or just small scale, i.e. one classroom, a small subset of students, etc.? I must admit when I see call for papers for 5,000 to 6,000 word articles on action research, I wonder how can one write that much about one action research project.
GC: Well, I've just finished a co-authored report (Crookes & Chandler, 1999) on an attempt to introduce an action research component into a basic "methods" class for post-secondary modern language/ foreign language teachers in the US university sector. (That is, these are not ES/FL teachers, but teachers of Spanish, German, etc.) That report comes out at 9,500 words including references and footnotes. It's action research on action research (in teacher education). It was just one project. We put in some action research stuff one semester, and we followed up to see what happened next semester. We talked to the student teachers and a few people in supervisory positions. We thought about what we were doing and read (and reported on) some of the relevant literature. I don't think it's a prolix report. But then I'm an academic -- what do you expect!!!
AB: The use of the word "small" is interesting as I think "smallness" is a common perception about action research and it goes back to the way research is commonly thought of as involving large scale, experimental or scientifically based studies. In fact, several teachers I have worked with have sometimes worried about just doing piddling little bits of action research that won't be seen as worthwhile. However, if the things you have discovered are also concerns for other teachers -- and if you are working collaboratively, you may well be uncovering some quite important institutional issues or problems that are preventing things happening more effectively -- then you are doing much more than small research. This is why writers such as Kemmis, McTaggart, Carr and so on argue that action research conducted in this way inevitably has a critical and political or ideological edge as it takes you beyond individual/technical (apply the methods, get the data, analyze the data, come to a conclusion) approaches into ways in which things can be changed.
The size of the research isn't as relevant as the breadth and depth. It seems to me that the processes involved in AR are at least as important as the product at the end of it. In fact some commentators imply that it could be that there never is a product, as in effect you go on spiraling continuously into further and different areas. Lenn de Leon, a teacher I worked with, said to me once, "The interesting thing about action research is that it raises as many questions as answers." She was expressing a positive feeling that AR made her observe things in a fresh way so that her teaching was constantly interesting and challenging.
In contrast to the "small" action research question, can you describe a large action research project?
GC: Well, large is a pretty ambiguous term to apply to a piece of research. In academic quantitative test design studies, you might have an N of 1000, but once the tests have been collected, a single individual can do the analysis in a few hours. Contrariwise, a life-history qualitative dissertation could have an N of 1 yet take several years of work to complete, resulting in a study 1000 pages long.
But, if you're really looking for BIG and a perspective that fully describes itself as action research, you've probably got to turn to the participatory action research (PAR) literature. There, because of the fully participatory nature of the work, entire villages may be involved. The same Kemmis and McTaggart we often cite, in the final years of their time at Deakin University, were involved in this sort of thing with Australian Aboriginal communities. But PAR is more prominent still in the "South" -- the less-developed countries.
Batliwala and Patel (1997) report on a participatory action research study (entirely non-academic and non-governmental) undertaken to improve the living conditions of poor women living in Bombay. In the initial phase of the study, like in many action research studies, they needed to assess the situation: they believed there was a problem (living conditions were visibly awful) but they didn't have much in the way of details. So they drew up a simple set of questions, did a bit of fund raising, and in the end, 15 interviewers and 8 coders, with a field supervisor and six other action research specialists surveyed 6000 families, a total of 27,000 "pavement dwellers". The data was collected in the space of a month. One hundred copies of the report, in Hindi and English, were distributed at a press conference two months later. This was, however, just the first phase of this piece of participatory action research. Of course, it doesn't concern education in the classroom, let alone EFL. But it is of interest to action research specialists partly because Batliwala and Patel discuss the extent to which the investigation exemplified PAR principles, and, I suppose, partly because it was big.
Let's change "large" to "complicated." Can you give examples of somewhat more complicated action research projects. Are any of the projects described in Anne's Teachers Voices 2 what might be called complicated action research projects?
GC: I don't really know about this use of the word complicated.
But perhaps an important point to remember is that action research is often
presented as spiral in nature. Look at the (originally Kemmis and McTaggart
inspired) diagram in Anne's book, which reoccurs all over the place in the
AR 
You observe to see what's going on, possibly with regard
to a problem or concern. You formulate a plan or an intervention, implement
it, evaluate the results and very often go on to a second or third intervention,
fine-tuning the first or alternatively trying something else to solve the
problem. This cyclical or spiral aspect of action research is very similar
to what can go on in academic qualitative research, where research questions
may be reformulated or even discarded during the course of a project, and
where additional unexpected material and findings may come up, all of which
might be reported. In fact, many academic qualitative articles have a phrase
near the beginning which say something like, "In this paper I report
on part of a larger study...." Now this is not to say that there isn't
a cyclical or spiral nature to quantitative academic research. There most
certainly is. But it is external to the individual article (though you will
sometimes find it internal to a dissertation, say, particularly in the physical
sciences).
AB: Also, I think we would probably both advocate a more collective and critical approach to action research than we have seen described so far in the ELT literature. This collaborative element would inevitably make action research, if not more complicated at least more complex and dynamic. I have already mentioned what I see as the capacity of collaborative action research to integrate with important change processes. I think you can also get greater generality (perhaps in contrast to generalization?) and trustworthiness (in contrast to validity?) when you have overlapping or linked AR taking place amongst a group as you can build up a composite picture of the situation within a common context. Then you can see whether what is emerging rings true for the people involved.
I like to think that the Teachers' Voices projects (1995, 1997, 1998) you refer to provide an example of this more complex kind of collaborative action research and on a fairly large scale. These were projects that emerged from the identification of a common research theme across the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) nationally. For example, exploring how teachers' course design practices were changing as a result of a new competency-based curriculum and looking at strategies for teaching mixed-ability groups were two areas that arose.
A network of AR groups each involving 5-7 teachers was set up in five different states in Australia and these groups were linked together both in their exploration of a common area but also in that the research processes were facilitated and shared with two NCELtr researchers, myself and Sue Hood. This meant that what was coming out of the research could be discussed from group to group and teachers in one state who wanted to be in contact with teachers in another could be networked together. The common theme did not mean that teachers were told what research to do. On the contrary it meant that teachers could take their own perspectives on issues about mixed ability groups for example that were important for them. In this way a very rich and diverse picture of what was happening in mixed ability groups could be built up and similar accounts could be linked together. In this way I hope these projects were rich and complex rather than complicated.
While action research is being done all over the world, do you see any unique opportunities for action researchers in Japan? Is there anything about a Japanese educational setting as you know it that would help or hinder an action researcher?
GC: An article by Ken Shimahara in Teaching and Teacher Education (1998) describes conditions for teachers in Japan state schools, to get together for professional development activities, which are prefecturally supported. This sort of thing, including demonstration lessons done by more experienced teachers for less experienced (if it is not just pro forma or going through the motions) might provide the collegiality and mutual support that would aid collaborative teacher research. I can't tell from the article just how widespread this is, though my Japanese students here say it is pretty common. On the other hand, in the private language school, and in the university part-time English teaching sector, I suspect the isolating and casual aspects of work would militate against collaborative teacher research, at least. Another point worth looking at, though, would be the tendency of academic publishing in Japan to be done "in-house". It is my understanding that to some extent it is as important, or more important, for one's professional career, that one publish in the journal of one's own university, than in outside or international journals? If so, it may be easier to publish action research reports in journals valued by one's profession in Japan than elsewhere.
AB: Here, I can only go on impressions gained through two brief visits to JALT, on my reading of the language teacher and on what my postgraduate students, several of whom live and work in Japan, tell me about their teaching situations.
First of all I was very impressed when I attended the JALT 1998 conference in the very high level of interest in action research. There were several extensive workshop discussions as well as presentations which shared a whole range of classroom-based and institutional areas for research. I'm not sure whether there is a JALT SIG group or a Japan action research network but the potential for it certainly seems to be there in ways that I have not really noticed in other contexts. The idea of action and practitioner research seemed well accepted to me. The big question for most of my students working in Japan seems to be how to introduce communicative methodologies into the classroom and to encourage Japanese students to speak more in English and to participate in interactive group activities. There immediately is a common theme that a teacher network could focus on to share ideas and to support each other's research.
What hinders AR, or indeed any other form of professional development, is casual and part-time work especially in the non-state school sectors, the lack of institutional structures and commitment to inservice opportunities and the compartmentalized nature of many teacher's work, the "island state" where there are very few opportunities to work in teams or even to find time to discuss classroom matters with other teachers.
Perhaps another point worth making is that while you can spend time reading about action research, it becomes a great deal more understandable when you actually do it. The majority of teachers I have worked with have said this to me. Graham's point about the cyclical and spiraling nature is not only well made but an essential aspect of understanding action research. There seems to be a point very early on (for the teachers I have worked with it's usually at the second workshop/meeting when people come back together after trying things out for a while) when the whole thing seems very confusing and mysterious. It's only as the process goes on and the researchers start to hypothesize, reflect on and share their perceptions about what is happening and the data start taking you in unexpected directions that the point of it all becomes clearer.
What are some of the questions teachers in Japan might try to answer using action research? For example, what are some action research questions dealing with teaching grammar communicatively, creating a learner-centered classroom, or, even, changing a curriculum.
GC: I do think that action research questions should come from the people involved themselves. So I will resist this a little bit. I have no idea if the things you've listed really are concerns that should be investigated. It would be somewhat arrogant or at least misguided of me to claim to know what teacher researchers in their specific contexts might do or want to look at. However, when I was a teacher in conversation schools in Japan, some of my concerns were, "we don't have any teacher development programs at my school", "we don't really know if the new materials we've just written work", "I never have a chance to talk to my colleagues about teaching", and "we don't seem to have any way of improving working conditions at this school". If I had known about action research at that time, I could, with participation from students or fellow-teachers, have investigated any of them with action research methods, and I might have even found some partial solutions. Remember, action research is not confined to what one teacher can do alone in their classroom.
Any advice for readers who want to get started on an action research project?
GC: Teachers who want to start action research should try to get together with at least one other teacher and try to find an issue, concern, or problem arising out of their practice that is important for them to address and possibly solve. If they can involve their students actively in the inquiry, so much the better. Two heads are better than one; many hands make light work; and it will probably be more fun that way, too.
AB: I'd be happy to talk with readers who are interested in further discussions about action research. I think that it is teachers themselves, rather than the academics who are currently advocating it, who will in the end test the relevance of action research for the language teaching profession.
Thank you both for the time you've spent participating in this interview. There are so many more questions to ask but space does not permit. For readers who would like more information, please see the annotated bibliography on action research resources in this issue.
References
Batliwala, S. & Patel, S. (1997). A census as participatory research. In McTaggart, R. (Ed.), Participatory action research (pp. 263-278). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Burns, A. & Hood, S. (Eds). (1995). Teachers' voices: Exploring course design in a changing curriculum. Sydney: NCELtr.
Burns, A. & Hood, S. (1997). Teachers' voices 2: Teaching disparate learner groups. Sydney: NCELtr.
Burns, A. & Hood, S. (Eds). (1998). Teachers' voices 3: Teaching critical literacy. Sydney: NCELtr.
Hammond, J. Burns, A. Joyce, H. Gerot, L. & Brosnan, D. (1992). English for social purposes. Sydney: NCELtr.
Brindley, G. Baynham, M. Burns, A. Hammond, J. McKenna, R., & Thurstun, J. (1996). A national integrated research strategy for adult ESL, literacy and numeracy. Canberra: Department of Education, Employment and Training.
Shimahara, N. K. (1998). The Japanese model of professional development: teaching as craft. Teaching and Teacher Education, 14(5), 451-462.
Carr, W. & Kemmis, S. (1986). Becoming critical: Education, knowledge and action research. London: Falmer Press.
Author Profile
Steve Cornwell teaches at Osaka Jogakuin Junior College. He is co-editor, along with Donald Freeman, of TESOL's New Ways in Teacher Education . His research interests include reflection and teacher-as-researcher.
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