The teacher as researcher

Universidade Federal de Santa Maria
Essay of the text: The teacher as researcher
Author: Jenniffer Priscila Cardoso
Santa Maria, 18 de abril de 2013.
HOLMES, J.(2005). The teacher as researcher. In CELANI et al. ESP in Brazil: 25 years of evolution and reflection. Campinas, SP. Mercado de Letras.

This working paper is not directed only to ESP teachers, but also to teachers of language. It provides many practical ways of producing a research by showing the experiences of others to improve teaching and learning practices.
The article begins with a question "What is research?" and discusses the various meanings of "research" that leads to the simple definition of "a variety of research activities" to the definition of Hatch and Farhady (1982) "a systematic approach to finding answers to questions".
By “finding answers to questions” it has to be the "right questions” for a research, it means potential research questions that involves the daily life of classroom teachers stimulating the reflection on the experience of the teachers and showing that it can be used as a basis of building them. As an explanation the author goes on showing two types of researches such as: informal research and academic research. To exemplify them he chooses a classical research: the Pennsylvania project in 1970. The project tries to answer the question "Which is the best method for teaching a foreign language?" and it shows how the question is inappropriate because it does not exist a "one best method" for teaching a foreign language. It shows how you have to be careful when choosing any question.
The section of the article “Teacher and Research” focuses on the role of the classroom teacher as a consumer of research involving classroom teacher. Teachers all over the world have been consumers and producers of research, but Brazilians academics did not see themselves, at that time, as producers. The main point of the section is to show that teachers must work out what fits in