3 ER.

Quarter
MAESTRÍA EN
ENSEÑANZA
DEL INGLÉS
OBSERVATION AND RESEARCH IN THE
CLASSROOM CONTEXT

LUIS AGUSTIN GARCIA MUÑOZ

 CLASSROOM OBSERVATION: READING REPORT.
By Agustin Garcia.

Classroom research is a huge topic which may derive in different aspects concerning
our teaching practice, its performance, and or feedback about how it was done either
by the teacher or students. Although we are always looking for effectiveness in
teaching practice, we must narrow what effectiveness is and also be specific to what
we are observing according to our outcome of study.
As teachers, we are endlessly observing and doing research in our classroom since
our job is trial and error repetition everyday, every student and every group; such
practice provides the chance to enrich our experience and expand our thoughts to
what is observable and what is not inside our classroom. Apart from teaching,
observation is always a task.
Flanders (1970) stated his FIAC (Flanders' Interaction Analysis Categories) in order
to categorize and measure behavior in a classroom. Personally, I consider it is too
limited to what a teacher does in a classroom. Then, Flanders' categories were
refuted. Y Maskowitz (1976, 1971) created FLINT (Foreign Language Interaction)
with the purpose of providing feedback in the area of teacher training, an efficient
teaching practice is/was. From my point of view, I still think that FLINT list is still
unbalanced or teacher oriented; apart from that, It is restricted only to stimuli given
by the teacher and responses given by the students while the behavior in a
classroom is way more than a question and answer session.
Moreover, FOCUS (Foci for Observing Communication Used in Settings) was
created by Far (1977). Though this "list" may seem shorter than the previous
mentioned, I strongly believe it allows us to observe and analyze all the events
occurring in the setting, and also enhances a way more detailed report of what
occurs in our lessons.
Yet, another area considered by FOCUS is the purpose of communication. I think it is
extremely important to motivate the students and let them know what language is for
and we as teachers must be open to explain so.
There were two different ways of conducting the observation of adolescence in terms
of discourse analysis. Discourse comprised of five levels by Coulthard (1975) and
the COLT (Communicative Orientation of Language teaching) stated by Frolich and
Spada (1985); however, Chaudron's proposal of discourse in the classroom sticks to
the current view of learning and teaching a language in a lesson. Chaudron's
scheme regards function on the structure units which lead to a better description of
the phenomena that take place in the classroom.
Doing observation in the classroom may sound easy but it is a whole world to dive in.
We must take into consideration the audience features; such as age, level, number
of students, even the schedule, the place they play they are from or if they attend
classes from a different city. The aspects previously mentioned correspond to things
that can be easily seen; however, we must consider that they have different
backgrounds at home, perspectives, and views of learning a second or foreign
language.

That is when ethnography joins the game.

To sum up, classroom observation and research are intimately linked even if we are
researchers. We are constantly observing phenomena or problems, analyzing
variables, stating hypotheses, making adjustments in our teaching practice in order
to correct or improve the processes in our classroom. We must keep in mind that
classroom observation and research is to modify our performance in the classroom
to impact status performance in the language by narrowing our study to what we
intend to make better.
REFERENCES
Universidad IEXPRO. (n.d.). Observation and research in the classroom context.