Methods of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts

The Methodology Chapters From the Handbook of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts, Sponsored by International Reading Association & National Council of Teachers of English

James Flood, Diane Lapp, James R. Squire, Julie Jensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135605728
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

This text makes available in a concise format the chapters comprising the research methodology section of the Handbook of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts, Second Edition. An introduction, designed to give K-12 teachers an understanding of the basic categories and functions of research in teaching, is followed by chapters addressing teacher professionalism and the rise of "multiple literacies"; empirical research; longitudinal studies; case studies; ethnography; teacher research; teacher inquiry into literacy, social justice, and power; synthesis research; fictive representation; and contemporary methodological issues and future direction in research on the teaching of English. Methods of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts is well-suited for use in upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level literacy research methods courses.

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Research on Teaching the English Language Arts: An Introduction for Teachers

Sandra Stotsky

Harvard Graduate School of Education

Cindy Mall

University of Illinois

In everyday life, we often do research to find practical solutions for immediate problems; we look for something that “works,” even if we don’t really know why it works. The immediate purpose of academic research in education, however, is to seek empirical evidence for explanatory generalizations, or theories, about the relationships among teaching practices, learning processes, and educational outcomes. The larger purpose of academic research is the development of theoretical knowledge.

Theoretical knowledge consists of systematically formulated and organized generalizations that explain the nature or behavior of a particular phenomenon. In the English language arts, these explanatory generalizations, or theories, constitute our knowledge about what happens as language teachers and language learners interact, what their interactions mean to them, why they take place, and what effects they have on the quality of language learning. The purpose of these theories is not only to explain what we can observe but also to predict what will or might happen. In essence, a theory is an educated “guess” about cause and effect for a particular phenomenon. A theoretical model derived from a theory tries to organize all the seemingly relevant elements of the phenomenon in a way that may account for its occurrence, and the model serves as a guide in formulating hypotheses for empirical studies of the phenomenon.

The purpose of much of the research in the English language arts is to determine how valid a particular theory is in explaining a particular phenomenon. The more validity a theory has, the more support it has, the more researchers can use it to guide further research, and the more teachers can rely on it as a general guide for pedagogical practice. Nevertheless, no matter how much explanatory strength a theory has, for example, no matter how much empirical evidence has been obtained to support the theory, theories in the English language arts, as in other areas, are always tentative. Problems constantly arise or new facts are discovered, that do not seem to be explained by existing theories. Moreover, our ability to understand any educational phenomenon is always limited by the complexity of human behavior. Every theory is simply the best explanation we have at the moment for a particular educational question or concern. Thus, academic research on teaching the English language arts is a continuous, never-ending process of systematic inquiry for enhancing the explanatory power of theoretical discourse on language teaching and learning.

This chapter is intended to give K–12 teachers an introduction to understanding the basic categories and functions of research in teaching the English language arts, as academic research is generally understood. It was designed with the assumption that most teachers do not have extensive backgrounds in understanding educational research. It was also designed to highlight, as much as possible, studies that tell us something about teaching or the teacher’s role in the learning process in order to compensate for the fact that there have been relatively few studies since the 1960s devoted to the teacher’s role in stimulating student learning in the English language arts (Peters, 1987). Although much of the research in the English language arts is addressed chiefly to other researchers or doctoral students (e.g., the research on planning processes in composing), or is of primary concern to public policymakers or educational administrators (e.g., large program evaluations), the illustrative research in this chapter was selected, as much as possible, for its potential appeal to classroom teachers or curriculum developers.

The chapter begins with a brief overview of what research is and what it is not. It then describes the two basic modes of academic inquiry—conceptual work and empirical research—with a discussion of empirical research in the English language arts divided into two categories: qualitative and quantitative methods. It concludes by suggesting how teachers might recognize these major categories of research in classroom-oriented studies and how they might go about determining the theoretical value of a study’s findings. However, the chapter also suggests why the usefulness of a particular study to a particular practitioner may not necessarily depend on the theoretical value of its findings. Thus, the overall purpose of this chapter is to help teachers become more intelligent consumers of, as well as participants in, educational research.

WHAT IS RESEARCH?

Academic research on teaching the English language arts is a planned, methodical exploration of some aspect of language teaching and learning. Regardless of the nature of the question or problem the researcher is investigating, researchers plan what they are going to do and proceed by systematically gathering data of some kind to address the question or problem. Data are facts. Sometimes they may be easily established and verified by others (e.g., the works of literature that secondary school teachers recommend for whole class instruction, as in Stotsky and Anderson, 1990). Or they may have a subjective quality and their status as facts depends on what researchers report they have observed (e.g., how students with different levels of reading ability participated in informal literature discussion groups, as in Wollman-Bonilla, 1994). Or they may be quantities resulting from criteria or instruments that assess the quality of language teaching and learning, as in Sadoski, Willson, and Norton, 1997. But researchers do more than provide their readers with data to inspect (e.g., a list of the readings certain teachers assign their classes; a detailed description of how particular sixth graders responded to their teacher’s invitation to talk informally about what they had read; or the combination of instructional variables associated with large gains in writing. They also interpret the meaning of these data. Researchers then suggest how their findings contribute to the development of theoretical knowledge about the process of language teaching and language learning and the effects of this process on the students’ development as a speaker, listener, reader, and writer of the English language.

In the English language arts, as in other subject areas, one must distinguish a research study from instructional materials that operationalize the pedagogical implications of research findings. For example, a workbook on the editing process by Epes and Kirkpatrick (1987) provides exercies designed to help adult basic writers discover whether they are most prone to overlooking either missing words, missing endings, or reversed letters. The exercises are based on many years of teaching, joint research (e.g., Epes & Kirkpatrick, 1978), and Epes’ (1985) in-depth case study of 26 unskilled adult students, all of which suggested that unskilled adult writers show different patterns of errors in their writing. While the material in Epes and Kirkpatrick’s workbook is clearly derived from their research findings, it is not the research itself. A bibliography (as in Epes and Kirkpatrick’s workbook) or an introductory section should suggest the body of research on which an instructional text is based.

It is also important to distinguish academic research from field-testing instructional material. Before mass distribution of newly created instructional material, field-testers for publishing companies attempt to determine the material’s usability in selected classrooms representative of the intended market. Their goal is to find out if the material needs to be revised (and made more useful), not if the the theoretical knowledge that the material was designed to reflect should be revised. Field-testing is also done by teachers. As Calkins (1985) points out, many of the studies conducted by teacher researchers in their own classrooms are also examples of field-testing. Teachers often try out their own or others’ ideas in their own classrooms. But, Calkins suggests, “Will this work in my classroom?” is not an academic research question.

One must also distinguish academic research from what is referred to as “advocacy-oriented research” or “action research.” In this kind of classroom-based work, a self-designated teacher researcher shapes a classroom lesson to achieve a particular self-chosen social or political goal. It is done for the purpose of “altering social relationships” in the classroom, which Harste (1992) asserts is the larger goal of literacy research. For example, Enciso (1994) used literature discussion in a fifth-grade classroom to bring up the topic of race and racism, which the children had not brought up themselves, in order to make them aware of the color of their skin and to shape their “cultural identities.” However, as the co-directors of the National Reading Research Center (1995) comment, it is not clear that researchers who engage in advocacy-oriented research “can know what is enabling, or empowering, for others” and can “instill a certain sense of empowerment within those who participate in our studies.” Their comments point to the flaw in such so-called research; its purpose is not to find answers to questions about an issue or problem in teaching or learning but to act on the belief that the answers to the questions are already known.

Finally, one must distinguish academic research from personal narratives describing a successful teacher’s philosophy, approach, and experiences in the classroom, such as Eliot Wigginton’s (1985) account of the Foxfire project, or Nancie Atwell’s (1987) book on teaching writing and reading in a middle school. Books or articles of this nature can stimulate other practitioners’ thinking, provide them with much useful pedagogical advice, and offer rich insights for researchers to use in creating or revising theory. But in themselves, they do not constitute academic research, a form of inquiry characterized by, among other things, the professional detachment of the inquirer, the systematic collection and write-up of data to address an explicit problem or question, and the use of a codified methodology (Chilcott, 1987).

Good research provides teachers with concepts to think with and ideas to think about. It also raises questions to stimulate their thinking about what they see or do in the classroom. But its purpose is not to propose a specific solution to a particular teacher’s classroom problems, to advocate a particular pedagogical practice, or to provide instructional materials for teachers or students. Rather, its purpose is to enhance a teacher’s ability to make intelligent instructional decisions. It is from this general perspective that teachers should examine academic research.

THE BASIC MODES OF ACADEMIC INQUIRY IN TEACHING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS

In order to understand the nature of empirical research on teaching the English language arts, it is useful to distinguish first the two basic modes of academic inquiry. In its categorization of doctoral dissertations for determining awards each year (e.g., Educational Researcher, 1988, p. 30), the American Educational Research Association (AERA) suggests two broad categories of academic inquiry concerned with the improvement of the educational process: conceptual and empirical work.

Conceptual Inquiry

Conceptual work is theoretical or philosophical in nature and is usually referred to as scholarship rather than research. It focuses on an examination of the assumptions and conditions that shape teaching and learning and on the formulation of broad principles for models of teaching and learning. It may draw insights from the results of existing empirical research, but it is not concerned with gathering new data from systematic observations to provide evidence for support of its propositions. The work of John Dewey (1938) is a prime example of conceptual inquiry in the field of education. He saw a need for active learning within a coherent intellectual framework, and he stressed the development of a curriculum that moved progressively in the direction of a “more objective intellectual scheme of organization” from roots in the student’s experience. But Dewey did not actually gather data from classroom observations to show that experience-based activities could lead to better and more meaningful learning than formal text-based discussion. We accept or reject his ideas according to how sensible, insightful, and well-reasoned we judge them to be.

The work of James Moffett (1968) is a notable example in the field of composition teaching. He proposed principles for developing a series of composition assignments that he believed could, over time, enhance growth in abstract thinking. Although he showed examples of student writing to illustrate the use of his principles in actual writing assignments, he, too, did not gather data from classrooms to show that the use of the principles he articulated did, in fact, improve student thinking.

Empirical Research

In contrast to purely conceptual work, empirical research focuses on the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data that can be sensed or experienced in some way, either to answer research questions, to test hypotheses derived from theories, and/or to develop hypotheses or theories. Examples of different forms of empirical research, according to the AERA, are experimental research, survey research, participant observational research, audiovisual recording analysis, in-depth interviewing, and empirical historiography.

Although North (1987) distinguishes four “communities” of empirical researchers in the field of composition (experimentalists; clinicians, or case study researchers; formalists, or model-builders; and ethnographers), most educational researchers have in recent years grouped various methods for empirically investigating questions of interest in English language arts into two basic categories of methods. This chapter uses the terms “qualitative” and “quantitative” to designate these two groups of methods because they seem to be the most commonly used terms in recent articles, including those in Educational Researcher, an official journal of the AERA. However, the terms qualitative, holistic, phenomenological, hypothesisgenerating, participant-observational, ethnographic, longitudinal, humanistic, naturalistic, field-based, interpretivistic, or hermeneutical are often used interchangeably, even though some researchers do not see them all as interchangeable; unfortunately, no clear definitions can be found that distinguish among all these various terms. Similarly, the terms positivistic, scientific, hypothesis-testing, or quantitative are also often used interchangeably. However distinct these two groups of methods may be in theory and in practice, a question we will return to later, all methods can contribute to the development of theoretical knowledge in teaching the English language arts.

In the next section, we look at the general features of these two broad categories of methods. Other chapters deal separately with various types of studies using these methods (see, for example, the chapters on case studies or ethnographic studies), and readers should consult these chapters for further illustrations and more detailed explanations of these specific types.

Qualitative Methods

Researchers use qualitative methods to investigate how language teaching and language learning take place in the complexity of their natural settings. They may explore the process of language teaching and language learning as these occur in the classroom, the home, or the community. Qualitative methods, by definition, feature qualitative data—the researcher’s description of what participants do or say about themselves and their activities in an educational setting. Studies featuring qualitative methods tend to focus on small numbers of participants and a thorough understanding of small, complete units of social interaction; hence, “thick” descriptions, or masses of details, are a salient characteristic of these studies. Researchers then analyze and interpret these details and often formulate categories for classifying their data. If their studies are not theory-based, they may propose tentative generalizations based on their data, and these tentative generalizations may be referred to as “grounded theory” because the theory has been derived from the data.

For example, Florio and Clark (1982) observed an elementary classroom to find answers to the following questions: “What opportunities for writing do students find in school? How is writing used by students to meet those opportunities? How do students come to differentiate among the functions of writing and the forms appropriate to them? What role does the teacher play in this process? What other contexual forces are operant” (p. 116)? After lengthy observations and an analysis of what they saw and heard, they concluded that, among other things, they could identify four different purposes for student writing in this classroom: students wrote to participate in community, to know themselves and others, to demonstrate academic competence, and to occupy free time. By providing categories for understanding how the teacher and her students used and talked about writing in this classroom, this study contributes to the formulation of a theory about the social meaning of written literacy in the classroom.

Studies featuring qualitative methods tend to be exploratory in nature. Sometimes qualitative researchers do not decide in advance all the aspects of the phenomenon under investigation they will explore; they hope to discover possibly important aspects that may not have been noted yet. On the other hand, sometimes they explore the possible significance of features that have been noted but which have not yet been considered relevant to an understanding of a particular phenomenon. For example, Wong (1988) examined teacher/student talk in writing conferences at an engineering school over a 3-month period. The descriptive research she had reviewed found that teachers tend to initiate talk i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Understanding Research on Teaching the English Language Arts: An Introduction for Teachers
• Chapter 2: Teacher Professionalism and the Rise of “Multiple Literacies”: How to Describe Our Specialized Knowledge?
• Chapter 3: The Design of Empirical Research
• Chapter 4: What Longitudinal Studies Say About Literacy Development/What Literacy Development Says About Longitudinal Studies
• Chapter 5: Case Studies: Placing Literacy Phenomena Within Their Actual Context
• Chapter 6: Ethnography as a Logic of Inquiry
• Chapter 7: Teacher Researcher Projects: From the Elementary School Teacher’s Perspective
• Chapter 8: Teacher Inquiry Into Literacy, Social Justice, and Power
• Chapter 9: Synthesis Research in Language Arts Instruction
• Appendix: Representative Synthesis Documents
• Chapter 10: Fictive Representation: An Alternative Method for Reporting Research
• Chapter 11: Contemporary Methodological Issues and Future Directions in Research on the Teaching of English