Lecturers’ Perceptions of Action Research and Current Challenges

Abstract

Understanding the research concept, its obstacles, and motivation is necessary to provide better academic services and opportunities for teachers less active in conducting research. To this end, 40 lecturers from an English Language Center with various qualifications and adequate teaching experiences in the Omani EFL context were selected as the population of this study. A questionnaire initially designed by Borg (2009) to measure/gauge? lecturers' views on research was used to collect the data. The findings revealed that the lecturers showed lower levels of research engagement due to problems such as a lack of methodological knowledge, heavy teaching loads, and unclear job specifications. In addition, objectivity was considered an essential criterion while conducting research, and published materials on the Internet were stated to be the primary source of reading about language-related resources. They also believed that conducting research would only moderately affect their teaching techniques. The findings of this study should help reduce the concerns and obstacles among lecturers and engage them more in the research area by focusing on the problems and facilitating the use of accessible resources to encourage them to conduct more research studies. Policymakers, managers, institutions, and teachers play essential roles in the new way of developing curricula, which considers teachers as researchers.