Language Teachers Becoming Researchers – on Ways of Arguing about One’s Research by Non-Native English Teachers

Abstract

Teacher research is becoming a more and more important area of study in applied linguistics and language pedagogy. We witness growing importance of individual research procedures for increasing teaching effectiveness in one’s own teaching micro-setting. It is not enough, though, for instructors to plan and implement action research, but it is also necessary for them to verbalise their research undertakings. Arguing about one’s research helps gain metacognitive awareness, increases teaching consciousness and maximises in-service development opportunities. The present study investigates the way teacher researchers argue about their research in research paper openings and closings. The data collected come from an unguided setting, the one in which teacher writers had not been subjected to any form of academic writing instruction. A corpus of almost 80,000 words from 83 teacher writers was analysed quantitatively and qualitatively to draw conclusions about teacher-as-researcher voice construal.

Keywords

• teacher as researcher
• action research
• teacher voice
• efl