What can we take home? Action Research for Malaysian pre-service TESOL teachers in Australia

Action Research (AR) is recognised as an effective way for language teachers to extend teaching skills and gain more understanding of teaching, learning and the classroom environment (Burns, 2010). It can also be a useful but challenging experience for trainee language teachers. This paper reports on the experiences of Malaysian trainee primary TESOL teachers who undertook an AR project during their practicum in Brisbane schools as part of a joint Bachelor of Education programme with an Australian University. The experience was demanding, as the trainees learned about AR methodology in the context of a practicum which was not only their first experience of teaching, but also took place in an unfamiliar cultural environment. The experience appeared useful in terms of developing habits of flexibility and reflexivity, yet some of the group expressed reservations on how useful the classroom pedagogies taught in the course would be in their home context. Findings contribute to the limited literature on language teacher development in cross-cultural environments and raise an important question for teacher educators: should AR be part of a larger field that we know as social theory or should the focus be more narrow and limited to the development of educational theory?