Thoughts on Action Research

Thoughts About Action Research -- A Tool to Improve Practice

Action Research is a great tool to use in order to improve your teaching practice. By creating and completing action researches within your classroom, you continually are evaluating your teaching skills and methods in order to be the most effective for the students. A teacher should constantly try to improve their teaching methods and action research is a efficient and effective way to improve our practice that is best suited for the students.

Ideas Generated from My Action Research Project

In my school, most of the CORE ESL students struggle with being able to demonstrate their knowledge accurately on reading assessments. The students struggle with understanding what the questions are asking based on their limited English proficiency (reading skills and vocabulary). My action research focused on the two research questions:

• When provided with a reading assessment that assesses students' reading skills and comprehension, if the students can read the passage aloud into a "whisper phone", will the students' ability to answer the questions improve?
• When provided a weekly reading assessment over the story, if having the teacher read the questions to the students right before and then having the students read the questions through a "whisper phone" to the teacher afterward, will the grades improve? (The teacher should read the questions and have the students first discuss what the questions are asking.)

The ideas generated from this project were to discover whether the discussion of the questions prior to testing and allowing the students time aside to read aloud the question and passages to a teacher would help improve their testing scores.

Suggestions Based on My Findings

A brief overview of my findings is all of the students read their entire test aloud into the "whisper phone" and every student that was assessed made a significant increase in the grade on the post-test on Friday. Therefore, my suggestion for other ESL teachers based on my findings would be:

• Allow the students a chance to read the test aloud. When the students are read their test aloud, they are able to score better on the assessments because they take the time to read each questions and answer. They also seem to feel more comfortable and not rushed.