‘You never know what research is like unless you’ve done it!’ Action research to promote collaborative student-teacher research

Abstract

In contrast with its high level of popularity in both research and practice for in-service teacher development, teacher research has received much less attention in pre-service language teacher education as a reflective learning approach, particularly in China’s context. Action research, as a major form of teacher research, has rarely been employed by teacher educators. This action research study undertaken by a teacher educator aimed to address this dual gap by examining the effect of collaborative research experience undertaken by a cohort of English as a foreign language pre-service teachers in China. Triangulated research methods were employed to gather two sets of data respectively reflecting the student-teachers’ views of their collaborative research and the teacher educator’s perceptions of the action research. It was found that both groups highly endorsed their research experience. Meanwhile, issues also arose in terms of the sustainability of such research experiences for both groups. The study highlights the necessity of incorporating collaborative student-teacher research and teacher educators’ action research into pre-service teacher education programmes, which entails the need to transform the existing foundationalist teacher education paradigm into a post-foundationalist paradigm, and to recognize teacher educators’ action research on pertinent issues in teacher education.