The Methodological Approach of Action Research in the Field of English Language Teaching

Qualitative research has been dominant paradigm in social research including English Language Teaching (ELT) for many years. However, there has been a paradigm shift towards qualitative research that has occurred in much recent social research. In addition, there has been a shift towards a new paradigm, often referred as ‘Action Research (AR)’ in which teachers as researchers study situations in effort to improve some aspect of professional practice. In this paper, we will take AR as a much broader approach within the qualitative research stance to see what is happening in educational and ELT research, so that teacher research can enhance the practice of teachers. With this new methodological movement, we have three purposes in this paper: 1) to explore two different methodological approaches within a theoretical perspective; 2) to criticize an example of sustained cross-school AR in order to better illustrate how action research can proceed; and 3) to investigate the application of AR in order to explore its potential for developing collaborative classroom-based AR. We believe that if further AR is to be sustainable by English teachers as researchers, it will be a promising area needing further research in educational and ELT research in Korea.