Theron Muller is an Associate Professor at the University of Toyama, Japan. He has presented plenaries at a number of domestic and international conferences throughout Japan and Asia. His publications include research into English language teaching and academic publishing. He is lead editor on two book projects, Innovating EFL Teaching in Asia (2012) and Exploring EFL Fluency in Asia (2014), both published with Palgrave Macmillan. His most current research interests include the teaching of English for medical purposes, investigating the experiences of authors pursuing academic publication, and improvement of journal review systems. He is active with JALT Publications and the Asian ESP Journal. As a teacher trainer, he is a member of the University of Birmingham English Language and Applied Linguistics Open Distance Learning team, tutoring, marking, and supervising on their MA in Applied Linguistics and MA in TESOL programs and he is an Associate Tutor on the University of Leicester MA in Applied Linguistics and TESOL program. He is a member of English Scholars Beyond Borders, a not-for-profit academic circle of international scholars. He is also a fourth year part-time PhD student at the Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology at Open University, UK, investigating the experiences of Japan-based authors writing for academic publication. His awards include the 2008 John Haycraft Classroom Exploration Scholarship. He can be contacted at theron@las.u-toyama.ac.jp
Morning plenary: Connecting the provinces in ELT research – Making the local visible globally
The field of ELT research has tended to be driven by innovations in teaching methods developed in the global center and pushed out into what Kachru (1992) referred to as expanding and outer circle countries. However, teaching and learning strategies developed in such center contexts are not automatically relevant to local, provincial classrooms, where a variety of social and educational factors can restrict their implementation and limit their relative effectiveness. This situation is perhaps further exacerbated by teacher training programs developed by and for center contexts that train teachers who will ultimately teach outside of the center in which they were educated. This presentation proposes one solution to this dilemma, which is to encourage individual language teachers working in provincial areas outside of the global center to investigate their own contexts and practices and feed their results back into both local and global systems of research and knowledge production. While pushing provincial research into global circulation requires considerable effort and persistence on the part of locally based teacher-researchers, I will illustrate how the personal and professional benefits gained can help outweigh those costs. The presentation will conclude with some practical ideas for participants to actively share their classroom research practice both locally and globally.
References
Kachru, B. B. (1992). World Englishes: Approaches, issues and resources. Language Teaching 25(1), 1-14.
Afternoon workshop: Teachers doing classroom research – An interactive professional development workshop
Jerry Talandis, Jr. and Theron Muller, University of Toyama
Teacher classroom research as a way for language teachers to explore and investigate their classroom practice is an important part of teacher training and education programs (Nunan, 1990). Such research generally involves a reflective cycle of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting (Burns, 2010). However, typical research models from the literature represent an ideal and may not reflect the lived experience of teachers investigating their classrooms. In this interactive workshop, participants will share their understanding and experiences of their classroom research projects. Participants’ ideas and experiences will be compared and contrasted with some of the key literature on the topic of classroom research. Examples of teacher research will be shared and used as a springboard for participants to think about their own classroom practices, possibilities for incorporating classroom research, and how this could facilitate their professional development. We will also introduce an alternative model of teacher research that has the benefit of putting the teacher at its center, rather than classrooms or teaching methods. We will ask participants to consider their own classroom research interests and activities from the perspective of the more traditional models and our alternative model. We hope this exercise will help teachers to envision a professional development path that they can apply in their own practice.
References
Burns, A. (2010). Doing action research in English language teaching: a guide for practitioners. New York: Routledge.
Nunan, D. (1990). Action research in the language classroom. In J. C. Richards & D. Nunan (Eds.) Second Language Teacher Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
