Al Rawahi, Abdullah Khalfan (2020) Building the bridge of affordances : exploring teacher research support in a university language centre. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

Supporting teacher research has gained increasing attention recently in many English language teaching contexts around the world. It can be divided, based on its context, into two forms: external (often short-term) support, happening in research programmes and schemes outside language teachers’ working contexts, and internal institutional support, happening within teachers’ contexts. This study explores the latter. Unlike previous research that has primarily focused on what individual aspects of institutional teacher research support need to be available, this study, drawing upon the concept of affordances, was conducted to fill a gap in understanding how support needs to be made available as a structure in order to help teacher research become a prevalent and sustained activity among language teachers. To this end, a qualitative case study approach was adopted to explore in depth what influences (i.e., facilitates or impedes) the support of teacher research in a university language centre in Oman. To address this research question, ten teacher-research facilitators and eleven language teachers were selected, and data were mainly generated through semi-structured interviews, reflective dairies, and repertory-grid interviews. The thematic analysis of the data revealed five main factors that seemed to influence the institutional support of teacher research in the case studied. The first three factors were related to the organization of the support, concerning its clarity (being clear about the whats, hows and whys of providing the support), congruence (alignment between expectations and practice), and commitment (dedication to the support of teacher research). The other two factors were related to the provision of the support and the teachers’ experiences of using it, concerning its accessibility (how easy it was for the teachers to make use of it) and utility (how useful it was for the teachers). Regarding practice, the study has many important implications for how the support of teacher research should be organized and provided within institutional settings. The study also contributes significantly to theory by shedding light on the virtually neglected area of institutional teacher research support and providing an evidence-based model that could serve as a conceptual framework for further research in this and other areas where affordances are under investigation. In addition, it highlights the methodological potential and implications of using a combination of repertory-grid and follow-up interviews to explore teachers’ perspectives on teacher research support in their contexts.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2300 Higher Education P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Language teachers -- Oman, Education, Higher -- Research -- Finance, Education, Higher -- Research grants
Official Date:	April 2020
Dates:	Date Event April 2020 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Centre for Applied Linguistics
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Smith, Richard (Reader in linguistics) ; Pinter, Annamaria
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	xiii, 306 leaves : illustrations (some colour), 1 colour map
Language:	eng

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