Research Community Needs Voices of Classroom Teachers
Dr. Arif Altun Touts Potential Role of Action Research

Recent exchanges on the TESL-L listserv and in the ESL MiniConference newsletter, regarding theory vs. experience as sources of teaching practice, motivated Dr. Arif Altun, of Nigde University, Turkey, to contribute the following article.

Should teachers be involved in applied research process? Or, are they mere practitioners to apply the professional research findings in their classrooms? These questions can be extended to many other similar questions. Such questions are frequently being explored extensively in pre-service and in-service programs through their research methods and Second Language Acquisition courses in their programs.

However, I think the real issue we need to reconsider would be how the practitioners could convert their experience into knowledge to help build better learning environments. The position in which classroom teachers are is an excellent opportunity to provide a better insight into what is going on in the real learning community. Their contribution, using the right tools, on the other hand, would just make it happen. For that purpose, action research as a research tool would reposition classroom teachers (practitioners) in the research community to make their voices heard in a scholarly manner.

Action research is a powerful research tool to solve the everyday problems directly relevant to actual situations in the field where all the parties are heavily engaged in developing a better context for learning. The steps in action research, on the other hand, differ from other types of research (See Nunan, 2002, for more information). These steps can be listed as follows: