Exploring teacher beliefs and classroom practices through reflective practice: A case study, written by Thomas SC Farrell and Jessica Ives, is an article which used the case study method on a second language reading teacher, to study the relationship between teachers’ professed beliefs and the classroom practices. This review discusses the article mainly in four parts: the appropriateness of the research approach, the confidence in the knowledge generated, the potential impact of the research and the ethical issues of the research.
The appropriateness of research approach
The paradigmatic assumption. The paradigm used in the article belongs to interpretivism, which I think is of high appropriateness about the the topic.
Firstly, …show more content…
The research design ‘refers to the logical structure of the enquiry’ (Mohammad, 2013), which services directly to the purpose of the research. There is no doubt that the article uses case study as the research design.
Other methodological issues. According to Mohammad (2013), research methods ‘specify the mode of data collection… includes whether qualitative or quantitative data is required’. The methods used here include three components: interviews, classroom observations and journal writings.
There is only one participant here, who is a novice teacher majoring the Applied Linguistics and trained as an ESL teacher, showing the research a small-scale one. It is understandable and appropriate to select such a well-educated teacher as their participant because the research sets its focus on the beliefs of second language teacher. However, the authors do not mention why they choose a teacher who has very little experience in teaching. Additionally, there do some issues, as the authors …show more content…
They include research sponsorship, research relations, informed consent and data dissemination.
Firstly, as I discussed in the former part, the research has no sponsorship from any funding organizations, so it is ethical to this extent.
Secondly, concerning the research relations, Catherine and Gretchen (1995) point out that no matter what the exact method researchers are using in qualitative studies, they ‘enter into the lives of participants’. As a result, they would have certain impacts, whether they notice this or not, on the people who take part in researches. However, in the part of introducing the participant, the authors only count the teacher as their participant, excluding students in class.
Thirdly, there do exists the ethical problem about the informed consent. In the article, the authors mention Dantes’ interests in participating in such a exploration about beliefs and class practices. However, they do not give enough evidence to show that they have got the permission or the willingness of the students who also are the key part of this