Doing Action Research in English Language Teaching. A Guide for Practitioners

Anne Burns has been strongly associated with action research (AR) in ELT for several years and this volume draws on the wealth of her accumulated experience in explaining and illustrating what AR is and how to do it. Designed as a practical introduction for pre-service and in-service teachers, the book opens with a chapter entitled ‘What is action research?’ and then deals in turn with the different stages in a typical AR cycle: planning (Chapter 2), acting (Chapter 3), observing (Chapter 4), and reflecting (Chapter 5). The volume concludes with a postscript containing two full examples of AR reports and a section with further reading and resources. The discussion is helpfully supported throughout with pre-reading questions, reflection points, and ‘classroom voices’: actual examples of AR and of teachers talking about their experiences as action researchers. The writing is very accessible throughout. Chapter 1 starts by exploring what AR is and AR's concern with the understanding of local contexts is rightfully emphasized. The distinction between AR and ‘teacher research’ more generally is an issue that could have been explored further in order to help readers see that AR offers practitioners (in various disciplines, not just teaching) one way of studying their own contexts. Other forms of teacher research exist, though, and what defines AR from these is the cyclical nature of its processes, as Burns elaborates on throughout this book. In Chapter 1, reference is also made to what is perhaps the most common reason English language teachers give for not engaging in research (see Borg 2009), a lack of time. Teachers clearly need strategies for integrating AR into their work so that it minimizes the extra burden it will create and here too, I would have welcomed more concrete advice on how teachers might achieve this. In fact, one overall observation about the text is that while it does an excellent job of explaining how teachers might go about the various stages in AR, less is said about how the kinds of conditions that support AR might be created in teachers’ workplaces. Clearly, unless such conditions exist teachers will struggle to apply the very practical suggestions this book offers.