Interviews.

September 2006.
Dr. John Adamson

(1) Please give a brief bio - publications-etc you would like highlighted.

I am John Adamson. I've been teaching for 20 years in the U.K., Germany, Thailand and Japan. I have a background in business administration but moved into ELT after a few years of sales work. I have the RSA Diploma, a Master's and a Doctorate in Applied Linguistics & TESOL from Leicester University in the U.K. and am currently teaching Sociolinguistics, Discourse Analysis, Study Skills, Business English and GE at college and company level in Nagano Prefecture, Japan.

As for publications, I think the following are the most significant for me:

Adamson, J. (2003). Challenging beliefs in teacher development: potential influences of Theravada Buddhism upon Thais learning English. Asian EFL Journal, September.
http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/sept_03_sub_hm.htm
(This study shows how I attempted to introduce a culture-sensitive Teacher Development tool into a college in Thailand.)

Adamson, J. (2004). Unpacking teacher beliefs through semi-structured interviewing: insights into the interviewing process in context. The Journal of Language and Learning, Vol. 2, No.2, pp. 114-128. http://www.jllonline
(This second paper perhaps illustrates how I interview and analyse data and prioritize contextual features from the interview and participants in the interpretative process.)

(2) What is your area of research and what methodology do you employ?

My areas of research include intercultural interviewing, Discourse Analysis, Business English teaching methodology, and recently Teacher Development. I am fundamentally a qualitative researcher and enjoy the process of interviewing people to unpack their beliefs about teaching and learning

(3) What issues do you face as a qualitative researcher?

I think perhaps the biggest challenge as a 'semi-structured' interviewer is to understand how the participants involved in the interview 'position' themselves to each other and how that can influence the ensuing talk. Subsequent issues concern the analysis of long interview scripts and the reduction of this data into findings which truly reflect what the interviewee intended to express. In response to this concern, I have recently written and presented about the dangers of over-reduction of data to 'fit' the researcher's purposes. This process of reduction often excludes what I term as 'cuttings'- the discarded data from the reduction process which may still shed light on teacher or student beliefs.

(4) What role does research into Teacher Development play in ELT?

This is potentially enormous really, yet vastly overlooked and neglected in the Japanese context. Freeman (2002) calls the situation where teachers just depend on their initial qualifications throughout their career without embarking on continuous professional development as "front-loading". The teaching culture prevalent in Japanese tertiary ELT settings, and also in many private language schools, is that there is no time or inclination for post-qualification Teacher Development in the form of collaboration with fellow teachers in terms of research or simply talking about teaching methodologies. Ferguson and Donno (2003) wrote about the necessity to make initial teacher training more appropriate/sensitive to the teaching context of course participants and also to create some kind of mechanism in which course graduates receive post-course opportunities to relate their current experience to their training.

This idea of post-training mentoring would provide a support for freshly qualified teachers often shocked and confused by their new teaching contexts in Asia, struggling to apply teaching methodologies to real practice. A local mentor could guide the teacher into the real world of teaching and thus prevent early career disillusionment. Research into attitudes concerning "front-loading" and ways to bridge the gap between the classroom and training fundamentally embraces how Teacher Development can be integrated as a new 'culture' into Japanese ELT. It is such research that Theron Muller, an editor for Asian ESP Journal (Asian EFL Journal's sister journal), and myself are currently conducting. We are investigating how a local research support group we founded a few years ago can be sustained and kept relevant to the evolving needs of its members.

Ferguson, G. and Donno, S. (2003). One-month teacher training courses: Time for a change? ELT Journal, Vol. 57, Number 1, pp. 26 - 33.
Freeman, D. (2002). The hidden side of the work: teacher knowledge and learning to teach. Language teaching, 35, 1-13.

(5) Which writer/researcher do you think is the most important for language teachers to study in the area of TD?

Donald Freeman's work comes to mind as a primary source of literature in this area, as does that of Steve Mann and Angela Creese at the University of Birmingham, Neil Cowie at Okayama University, and Julian Edge. Baker and Johnson's (1998) research into teacher to teacher dialogue as a means to enhance Teacher Development is also an important study for me personally as a qualitative interviewer.

Finally, one book seemingly always open on my desk in the last year has been Bill Johnston's (2003) Values in English Language Teaching (London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) which is a constant source of reflection about the values/principles/ethics involved in ELT. Personal values seem to influence many conscious and unconscious decisions we make in the evaluation of students, texts, courses, and fellow teachers. Johnston's work reminds and warns me of this all-pervading influence.

Baker, C. D. and Johnson, G. (1998). Interview talk as professional practice. Language and Education, Vol. 12, no. 4, pp 229 - 242.

John Adamson
September, 2006