Overview
I have written this article from an essay that I plan to hand out in an undergraduate seminar. I have written what seems to be a shallow but deep essay about what it means to try to use the “party research” method used in psychological research in the study of English education.
Recently, I have been very interested in the method of “party research. I used party research as a research method for my own research when I was a sophomore undergraduate student, but I found it very unwieldy, so I decided to do another kind of research.
Therefore, I gave up on party research when I was in my second year of undergraduate school. However, at the time, it seemed that party research was too novel a method, but now we know that there are people who have developed party research methods who give lectures abroad (how surprising!), and that there are many people who have been involved in party research in the past! ), and international conferences have been held as a result, so I think it is a research method that has become rather widespread.
Now, although I wrote that this type of research on the participants was the first of its kind in Japan, it is actually a method often used in the world of psychology, and was originally created in the world of psychology. What has permeated the current research is probably the background of the current research, which is that you should not include yourself as a participant in the experiment.
The reason why you should not include yourself as a participant in the research is also to prevent participant bias in the experiment. After all, there is hesitation in the world of English education to include oneself as a participant in an experiment (and those who do such research often tend to try to take a qualitative approach, such as conversation analysis, without using statistical methods).
However, when it comes to English education, and teacher training in particular, the introduction of party research is a prerequisite. The party research originally started when a boy who had the idea of schizophrenia and had caused the original so-called “explosion” was admonished to do research on himself. It is no exaggeration to say that, so to speak, conducting research on oneself is the most essential part of party research.
It may sound like people around me are saying that it is impossible to obtain objective data from such research, but if that is the case, then what is the “objective data” really referring to? If we were to go further, it could become a grand theme of what research is all about. However, in the world of English education, there is too little discussion about it. We have to admit that.
Thinking about party research
There is a saying that goes, “Where there are principles, there are exceptions. Applying this to research, it means that there are some principles of research that are out of line with research. However, researchers in English education must actively think about this. There is a man named Dr. Tajiri who is now a professor at Kansai University.
His teaching method was considered unscientific, but he has gained the support of many students and was awarded the Palmer Prize, which is considered the highest award in the world of English education. However, in the world of research, it was ridiculed as unscientific.
Is that what research is all about? In other words, if something is supported by students, but it is unscientific, does that disqualify it from research? Everyone wants to do research that will be useful to the English teaching community!” you may have thought.
However, someday, as we continue to publish and submit papers, we forget about such things, and buried in many papers, it becomes an object of cynicism from English teachers, who say that we are ignoring the field. In that case, would you call something that ignores the field “research”? I have a tree that needs to do research on teaching methods that are supported by students. And that seems to be very important, doesn’t it? Let me repeat that. It is really important.
I think it’s very important to do science without looking at things that are unscientific from the perspective of conventional science.
But let’s say that the study of the parties contributes to the field of English language learning, and we have to have a very deep discussion about it.
Conclusion
In my opinion – and I say this with absolute certainty as an English language researcher – researchers in English education should establish a method that encompasses the seemingly unscientific teaching of English. Earlier, I wrote that “thinking about what research means” for English education would be a grand discussion.
Yes, this is a kind of paradox of research, and if we can have a deep discussion about it, we may even need to write a paper about it. At least, that’s what I think, and that’s what I’m going to do for a while.
