NovELTy October 2000 [antikvár]

By the time this issue maches you, the well-diserved but shorter than excapted summer holidays will long be forgotten. While most of us enjoyed the sun and cooled our bodies in the fresh water of the sea or a lake, many of our colleagues were working busily, doing research and writing up results, some of which you can read about in this issue. Why do teachers do research, and should they do research at all? After all, one may think that writers write, teachers teach, researchers do research, that is the way it has always been and that is the way it should be. However, we also know how much dissatisfaction and frustration it breeds when theory is separated from practice and practice is not rooted in theory. The ideal scenario in which theory informs practice and practice informs theory can only come about if some ambitious teachers are willing to devote time, energy and knowledge to systematically investigating their classrooms and their learners. Their results can enrich their own practice and that of others and can also feed into the shaping and developing of underlying principles. This issue of our journal gives a small selection of articles introducing various types of teacher research, each of which has implications for the classroom. First a secondary school teacher, Elekes Katalin, describes a research method, the think-aloud technique, which has been applied successfully by researchers and can be used by classroom teachers themselves if they wish to get a deeper understanding of how their learners perform learning tasks. Our international contributor, Bojana Petric, who formerly worked as an EFL teacher in Yugoslavia, investigated the development of the listening skills of a group of university students. She found that without systematically working on these skills, the students' listening test results did not improve. There is a lesson in this for both college and university language instructors and school teachers, namely that mere exposure to the foreign language is not enough.