A handbook for Exploratory Action Research

47 
| How can I explore?
11. Pictures of your class
In some cases, in relation to some research questions, 
taking photos of your class can be helpful. For example, 
if your question relates to the way the desks are arranged, 
or to the way that you use the chalkboard or a whiteboard, 
photos will be useful. Mauro – one of the Champion 
Teachers, whose story you will be reading later in this 
chapter – used photos to keep a record of the changes
he brought about in classroom arrangements. Together
with other sources, this helped him see the effects of
these changes.
12. Students’ performance on tasks (written or 
recorded). 
You can look at and analyse students’ written work to 
understand issues in their performance. For example,
if you are interested in why students appear to be using
a particular grammatical structure incorrectly, it would be 
logical to begin by looking at samples of their work and 
describing the way it is used there. For oral production,
you could record a group of students engaging in a 
speaking task and then transcribe what you hear. 
Transcription is quite time-consuming, so you could choose 
to write down just those utterances where the particular 
problem you’re interested in seems to be occurring.
You can also combine these techniques with chats or 
interviews with students which help you understand 
reasons for particular aspects of their performance. If you 
come to compare samples of their later work (for example, 
following an action research intervention) with their initial 
performance, it will still be valuable to get students’ own 
reflections on reasons for change or on the difficulties 
they’re still facing. 
Task 5.4 @
Let’s summarise! From what you’ve read, which of the
kinds of data 1. to 12. would be suitable for: