RS1_Morning Section José David Herazo R.

Assignment 1: Research interests and topics

As you told me today (Feb. 19), most of you wanted to attend the talk by former Colombian
president Ernesto Samper. I hope you have enjoyed his talk and recognize the importance of
thinking in post-conflict terms. That being said, with this assignment I hope we can make up for
not having a lesson today. The purpose of the assignment is twofold: 1) Provide reasons to justify
research in the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom (PART 1), and 2) Identify possible
topics of interest that you may decide to focus on later during this course (PART 2).

PART 1: The why of research

Based on our discussions and readings, please provide at least five reasons why we should do
research as EFL teachers. Academic rather than everyday language is encouraged. Your reasons
should be one-sentence long and follow tweeter-like format: no more than 140 characters!!!!
Write them below.

WHY SHOULD EFL TEACHERS DO CLASSROOM RESEARCH?

1

Email this chart to me together with the product of Part 2, all in a single file.

PART 2: Identifying research interests & topics

The itch to do research usually starts with something that interests you. So we will start there as
well. Please follow the next steps to brainstorm on topics of your interest.
RS1_Morning Section José David Herazo R.

1. Think of possible topics you may be interested in. These may be things that you have
observed in high school lessons, or that you have experienced yourself when
teaching. Write each one of your topic ideas on a paper card. Don’t worry about being too
general or making mistakes at this point.

2. Visit the English teaching forum web page and surf through article titles and
abstracts http://americanenglish.state.gov/english-teaching-forum

By clicking here
you will see the
content page of
each issue. Then
click on titles to
read the abstracts

This tab will show you

past issues…..

….organized by
year

Is there something that especially catches your interest? Write it down on a card too!!
RS1_Morning Section José David Herazo R.

3. Okay, now that you have a list of topics (I hope that by now you have at least 10 different
topics that interest you!!), it’s time for reading a little bit about them. For that you can:

- Google your topic in google scholar (google académico) :

http://scholar.google.com.co/schhp?hl=es-419

and/or

- Look up your topic in Wikipedia (check that sources are reliable!):

http://www.wikipedia.org/

and/or

- Search key words from your topic in Forum magazine

http://americanenglish.state.gov/english-teaching-forum here exactly:

HERE!!!!

By now you not only have a list of interesting topics written on cards, but you already have
information about each one of them. What you need to do next is prioritize them: From all the
topics you have, pick only three that you consider are THE MOST INTERESTING FOR YOU. Fill out
the following chart with the three top topics and a summary of what you have found about them.

Topic Summary of what I have found Source

1.
2.
3.

You need to email me this chart in a file together with the product of Part 1, NO LATER THAN
FEBRUARY 24. Don’t forget to print a copy of that file and bring it to our next lesson.