English Language Teaching in its Social Context

theby60 ROD ELLISdeem necessary. Crookes (1 993), however, argues that when research is entirely local andno attempt to generalize is made it is less necessary to conform to the requirements ofreliability, validity, and trustworthiness. He also suggests that action research reports do notneed to be academic in style.They can take the form of ‘teacher-oriented reports’ and thusbe more discursive, subjective, and anecdotal. The difference between the positions ofBrumfit and Mitchell and Crookes are indicative of the lack of clear criteria for determiningwhat constitutes good quality action research.From the educational perspective described above, the gap between the researcher/theorist on the one hand and the practitioner on the other is seen as the inevitable productof the social (and, one might add, political) worlds which they inhabit. As Kramsch (1995)has pointed out the behaviours that these two social groups typically manifest are symbolicof the value systems to which they adhere. The move to involve teachers in research canbe seen, in part, as a move to reshape the symbolic capital of teachers’ behaviour by investigatingit with the authority to be derived from research.This is one reason why the rationalefor action research so frequently makes reference to its contribution to professionalism inthe teaching fraternity.One way of viewing action research is as a means by which teachers can test ‘provisionalspecifications’ (Stenhouse 1975) in the context of their own classrooms.These specificationscan be drawn from the teacher’s own practical knowledge, in which case action research canhelp to make explicit the principles, assumptions, and procedures for action that comprisethis kind of knowledge. Alternatively, the specifications can be drawn from the technicalknowledge provided by research. Action research serves as an empirical test of whether thegeneralizations provided by confirmatory research or the understandings provided by interpretativeresearch are applicable to specific classroom settings. When teachers consistentlyfind the results of their own research do not support the findings of confirmatory orinterpretative rcscarch they need to be prepared to reject these as inapplicable to theirown contexts. Action research, then, functions as a way of implementing the third of Weiss’models of research use ~ interactive model ~ bridging the gap between technicalknowledge and practical knowledge.The question arises as to whether the applicability of proposals based on research mustnecessarily be submitted to an empirical test by requiring teachers to take on the role ofresearcher (as Stenhouse advocates) or whether it might be possible to predict which proposalsare likely to be acted on through an examination of the proposals themselves. It seemsreasonable to suppose that some proposals are inherently more practical than others. Whatmakes them so?To address this question we turn to the study of the uptake of innovations.Innovationist perspectiveA number of applied linguists have recently turned to work on innovation to help themunderstand the variable success they have observed in both large-scale language projects inthe developing world and the variable response to new ideas among teachers in the developedworld. Kennedy (1 988), White (1 988 and 1993) and Markec (1 993) have all drawn oninnovation research in a variety of disciplines (e.g. Rogers (1 983) in sociology, Lambrightand Flynn (1 980) in urban planning, Cooper (1 989) in language planning and Fullan (1982)and (1 993) in education). Henrichsen (1 989), Bcretta (1 990), Stoller (1 994) and Markee(1 994b) have reported actual studies of innovation in language teaching. It should be noted,however, that to date there has been no study of innovations stemming from proposals basedon SLA.‘~