Nick Osuna Roa Licenciatura en Lengua Inglesa Universidad de San Buenaventura noviembre de 2013

IMPORTANCE OF RESEARCH IN EDUCATION Training in research is considered an important part of profiles of professionals in English Language Teaching from Universidad de San Buenaventura. According to the study guide of its Research course, this tool will allow teachers in training as well as future teachers from USB meet the goals formulated in PNB-Bilingualism National Plan. Training and experience in approaching institutions problems for systematically and effectively implementing innovations would be desirable in a teachers training process at USB and so would be a permanent evolution trend in its educational practices. But, is research important in education-specifically in Second Language Acquisition? And, whats the appropriateness of some research methods in education?

Field (2013) claims that education not based upon research and evidence runs the risk of being based upon dogma, theory, ideology, convenience or prejudice. Education should promote freedom, democracy and equality of opportunity; develop active citizens; and make a difference in individuals life. Research, therefore should enable all of the mentioned risks to be challenged. Field mentions some benefits of a research-driven education: It cant be easily used for propaganda and political purposes. It prevents teachers to guide their practice around selected ideologies for scoring political points. It allows bringing new theories and technological advances to the education environments preventing teachers to base their practice solely on their own learning experiences and avoiding education to run the risk of being outdated. It allows to combine, test and challenge theories so teachers can adapt to suit local and personal environments where success in education processes are influenced by a multitude of factors, social backgrounds, family background,

Nick Osuna Roa Licenciatura en Lengua Inglesa Universidad de San Buenaventura noviembre de 2013

personality, age, gender, location. Teachers can adapt policies to fit the individual needs of their own students, too. It can help teachers to understand what works and why, what the short and long-term implications are, provide a justification and rationale for decisions and actions, help to build a repertoire to help deal with the unexpected, identify problems, inform improvement and so forth. (Field, 2013) Research ethics provide the assurance that professionals in education need to be able to trust their sources of information. Performance of teachers can be demonstrated through the publication of research findings so the public could have faith in the profession. Research methodologies give teachers tools to analyze and make informed decisions about their practice so it wont be based solely in intuition and personal experiences that can either be successful or fail. It helps teachers to share with their colleagues, to be connected so that efforts are not duplicated but can be combined to build on each others findings speeding invention and innovation in ways of learning.

Significance of Second language acquisition research for learning and teaching issues is addressed by Florence Myles in one of her articles. Myles notices that many factors have been identified as playing a role in SLA and outlines what she calls the emerging relationship between SLA research and language pedagogy. According to this writer, SLA research is an extremely buoyant field of study which has attracted much theoretical and empirical work in the last two or three decades. Much progress has been made in gaining a better understanding of the processes involved in learning second languages, as well as the different external factors which affect this process Similarly, the implications of SLA research for teaching are now receiving more attention, as is the specificity of the classroom context for understanding learning, but much more work remains to be done in these areas. There is still a huge gap - not unsurprisingly, given the limits of our knowledge between the complementary agendas of understanding the psycholinguistic
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Nick Osuna Roa Licenciatura en Lengua Inglesa Universidad de San Buenaventura noviembre de 2013

processes involved in the construction of L2 linguistic systems, and understanding what makes for effective classroom teaching.

Some qualitative methods of research in education include ethnography, phenomenology, case study and action research. All of these methods have advantages and disadvantages.

Case study, for example, allows a lot of detail to be collected that would not normally be easily obtained by other research designs. It tends to be conducted on rare cases where large samples of similar participants are not available. But one of the main criticisms is that the data collected cannot necessarily be generalized to the wider population since it is also very difficult to draw a definite cause/effect from case studies.

Action Research can be used in education by the practitioner who wants to explore their own teaching style/practice. A practitioner who decides to use this research method has to be prepared to critically analyze and evaluate their practice if they want to make changes and improve. It must be prepared to take action as a result of the findings, but its involvement in the process poses ethical dilemmas. Now, since some educational institutions believe practitioners should use Action Research as part of their continuing professional development, they could introduce biases into the research conclusions.

To sum up, research plays a key role in education and specifically in SLA and there are several methods in it with their advantages and disadvantages that depends on the purpose of the investigation, conditions in which research is conducted, the involvement or participation of the researcher in the problem studied and others.

Bibliography
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Nick Osuna Roa Licenciatura en Lengua Inglesa Universidad de San Buenaventura noviembre de 2013

Field, K. The importance of research for education's future. (2013). In: http://www.expressandstar.com/education/2011/06/14/the-importance-of-researchfor-educations-future/ Myles, F. Second language acquisition (SLA) research: its significance for learning and teaching issues (No date info). In: https://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/421