Abstract

Researching into English teaching, learning and assessing in Chile has always been an overwhelming endeavor. For some reason, teachers of English from either the school system or tertiary education, have been immersed in a great deal of classroom teaching hours that very often leave little room for researching or publishing. This may be clearly a disadvantage for the enhance- ment of metacognition and reflection as two essential skills for teacher devel- opment. Likewise, researching and publishing have sometimes developed a grounded stigma of two activities that are distant from classroom reality and teaching practice. Both are usually described as theory-based and alien-like with no impact in what in-service teachers of English have to face in their jobs and inside the classroom. The explanation for this has generally been that university training is just theory that can not be applied anywhere and schools are just practice that reflects what really happens there. Both assumptions are probably half true, because theory nurtures practice and practice nurtures theory, so there should be a bidirectional relationship that we all have certainly been unable to build. This book constitutes an initial effort to help build this necessary rela- tionship between practice and theory as two constructs that are tightly inter- twined. The book originates from some of the action research studies conduct- ed by in-service teachers from the Master in Innovation of Teaching, Learning and Assessment at the University of Concepción. These in-service teachers of English who are enrolled in this master program certainly want to provoke a deep change in their teaching practices and students’ learning. Action research as its name suggests implies that research practitioners (real language teachers) identify teaching or learning problems of their daily professional life, think of a plan of action to intervene their teaching practices, assess the impact of their own pedagogical interventions, and repeat the research cycle again, if neces- sary, as a continuous process of reflection and improvement.