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Aslı Saglam's Blog about CPD in ELT

Highlights from Canakkale ELT Research Conference 2012

April29

I attended the ELT Research Conference at Canakkale 18 Mart University this weekend and had a terrific time.

This conference was special because all presenters reported the results of their research. In “Redefining the relationship between research and what teachers know” Donald Freeman stated that there is a gap between research and teaching due to “an awkward silence” that has grown up between the teacher and researcher and he further claimed that teachers should undertake research because “you have to know the story in order to tell the story”.

This conference was unique in this respect because we had the opportunity to tell our own stories and listen to those of other colleagues.

 

Plenaries were given by Rod Ellis, Cem Alptekin and Norbert Scmitt and the conference program was intensive.

There were more than 60 concurrent sessions ranging from qualitative and quantitative research, from individual to collaborative research and from the topic of language learning and acquisition, teacher training and education, early English education, culture and literature in English education, language testing and evaluation to multimedia and ICT in English education. And let me remind, all of these sessions including the poster presentations, were research.

 

I presented a research that I had done in partial fulfillment of the teacher education course that I had taken. It was entitled ‘EXPLORING TERTIARY-LEVEL ENGLISH TEACHERS’ PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE’. Very briefly the study explored how in-service teachers conceptualize and articulate their practical knowledge about English teaching though narrative reconstruction of their experiences. The research question was: How do teachers attempt to reason about their practices and the practical knowledge underlie them? You can find more info about the study and my presentation here.

Also, I had a poster presentation reporting a research which examined L2 reading motivation of Turkish university students. This study intended to investigate university students’ reading motivation and its relations to their reading performance on institutional reading achievement test. Participants included 191 university EFL students who were enrolled in different instructional levels at the school of English language instruction. Participants were classified into two categories; poor readers and good readers based on their reading scores on their reading achievement test scores. Participants responded to a Motivation for Reading Questionnaire (MRQ) after they had taken achievement test in reading and they were compared on their reading comprehension and on various reading motivation variables using factor analysis and multiple regression analysis in SPSS. The 5 most influential factors were students’ intrinsic motivation in curiosity and extrinsic motivation in social dimensions, family involvement and compliance with respect to task and time requirements. Click here for more detail

I am looking forward to attending Canakkale 18 Mart University’s conference next year again (I need to find a good research topic! See the positive backwash effect 🙂

 

It was such a nicely organised event. I had to opportunity to meet lovely people, catch up with my friends and I learned a lot from the presentations and further ideas for research.

 

 

 

Working out from Simon Borg’s (2010) extensive list of potential benefits of teacher research, I hope that there would be more conferences and opportunities for collaborative inquiry because according to researchers outlined in Borg, teacher research;

  • “develops teachers’ capacity for autonomous professional judgements (Roberts, 1993);
  • reduces teachers’ feeling of frustration and isolation (Roberts, 1993);
  • allows teachers to move out of a submissive position and be curriculum innovators (Gurney, 1989);
  • allows teachers to become more reflective, critical, and analytical about their teaching behaviours in the classroom (Atay, 2006);
  • makes teachers less vulnerable to and less dependent on external answers tro the challenges they face (Donato, 2003);
  • fosters connections between researchers and teachers (Crookes, 1993).
  • Creates a problem solving mind-set that help teachers when they consider other classroom dilemmas and improves teachers’’ instructional decision-making processes (Olson, 1990).”
References:
Borg, S. (2010). Language Teacher Research Engagement, Cambridge Journals, 43(4), p. 391-429.
Freeman, D. (1996). Redefining the Relationship between Research and What teachers Know (in Bailey& Nunan Eds, Chapter 4).

 


 

One Comment to

“Highlights from Canakkale ELT Research Conference 2012”

  1. May 7th, 2012 at 1:23 pm       Lily Says:

    Hi Your blog is so great and so professional. If you would like to see my blog at

    http://lilyviewlands.edublogs.org/
    Lily 🙂


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