English language teachers’ beliefs about research: Perspectives from the Netherlands

Samenvatting

In education generally there has been sustained interest in recent years in the issue of teacher research engagement – i.e. ways of enabling teachers to be more involved in both reading and doing research. The belief underlying this drive has been that such engagement is good for teachers’ professional development – reading and doing research can enable teachers to better understand their work, encourage them to reflect on what they do, lead them to experiment with new ideas, and become more autonomous (see, for example, Kincheloe, 2003; Kirkwood & Christie, 2006; Lankshear & Knobel, 2004). Overall, such processes can also enhance the quality of teachers’ work. While the benefits of teacher research engagement have been widely discussed, we know less about teachers’ beliefs about research and the author has been studying this issue with reference to English language teachers around the world. This paper reports on the views of a group of teachers of English working in the Netherlands.