THE SECOND STAGE OF THIS STUDY, THE
ACTION CYCLE, SOUGHT TO CREATE AND USE
CERTAIN TOOLS TO BUILD A BRIDGE BETWEEN SECOND LANGUAGE
RESEARCH / RESEARCHERS AND TEACHERS. and that visitors spent the most time on the resource page. It is important to note that the while the videos opened in the resource page, the articles and support guides, when clicked, opened a new tab.
The following table( Table 5) shows the overall use of the articles and the support guides. The data here are indicative of how many visitors viewed each article and guide and the average time on each page.
From the data in Table 5, it becomes evident that the articles were viewed twice as often as the support guides( total articles = 105 page views; total guides = 52 page views). Also of interest is the more frequent accessing of the support guides in English rather than French, especially given that the vast majority of the discussions were in French despite the bilingual introduction, questions and invitation to use either of Canada’ s official languages. More frequent access of the articles as opposed to the support guides is worthy of note because the guides were meant to assist the users in understanding the articles.
The Google analytics data shows how users engaged with the website. From the reported 52 users to whom the website and password were provided, the site generated 669 visitors with 1089 visits over the six week period.
The article and guide analysis suggests that the visitors to the site used the articles and support guides provided by the site. This can be seen through the data that suggest that the articles and support guides were potentially accessed 160 times by 111 visits to the Resource page. The Resource page being the most frequently visited page indicates the importance placed on the resources.
Discussion forum
The discussion forum provided space where the researchers and teachers could interact. Seven researchers – the author of each article, or at least one of the authors in the case of co-written articles – contributed to the discussion forum on the week their article was featured. Their comments were always in response to a comment posted by a teacher participant. Thirty-four teacher participants contributed to the discussion forum. The vast majority, thirty-three of the teacher participants, were teacher candidates. These participants contributed on an average of four occasions over the six-week period with the majority of contributions corresponding to the last four weeks when they were attending classes rather than on practicum or on reading week. None of the participant messages addressed the researchers directly either to instigate conversation or in response to researchers’ direct questions.
DISCUSSION
This study sought to reduce the linkage gap between second language researchers and teachers by addressing the causes of the gap – difference in language register and lack of access to resources or common space for interaction – by means of following the steps in Graham et al’ s( 2006) Knowledge to Action Process Framework and in particular by choosing strategies within the framework that were aimed at bridging the identified differences between the two work cultures. In this discussion section, I return to the steps followed and data gathered with a view to determining their influence on reducing the linkage gap as identified.
The first stage of this project, the knowledge inquiry phase, sought to bring a limited number of research articles to teachers. The analytics showed that the teachers spent the most of their onsite time on the Resource page of the website, accessed all of the articles and chose to access the articles almost twice as often as their corresponding support guides. This stage of the process responded directly to the following participants’ cited impediments to using research: availability of articles, irrelevance of topics, datedness of articles and lack of transferability to their context. Unfortunately, given the limitations of this project – lack of synthesis of research results and no guidance as to how to judge the quality of a research article – this phase did not respond to participants’ cited concerns with the unknown quality of research and the inconsistency of results. Despite the success of the project to bring research to the participants, it fell short of responding to the participants’ major concern – that of the unknown quality of research articles.
The second stage of this study, the action cycle, sought to create and use certain tools to build a bridge between second language research / researchers and teachers. In particular, the tools were created or chosen with the goal of addressing differences between researcher and teacher cultures specifically targeting differences in language register and lack of common space. To facilitate offering such tools to teachers, an intermediary – CASLT – was used to link the project with second language teachers. That the vast majority of questionnaire( 97 %) and discussion forum( 97 %) teacher participants were brought into the project by me and another Faculty of Education instructor reveals the ineffectiveness of using CASLT as a link to teachers for this study. Whereas CASLT’ s instigation and financial support of the project were successful in seeing the project come to fruition, CASLT did not provide study participants from their links to the teaching community with the promotion methods used. When this finding is considered in conjunction with the fact that my personal communication with second language consultants did not succeed in garnering much, if any, teacher participation, it suggests several potential mitigating factors to using intermediaries. For example, teachers may not have received the information or teachers may have known about the project but
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