These are two areas of major interest to junior and senior high school teachers who face the task of implementing the new Monbusho Courses of Study for English language education. An argument will be made throughout this article that CCR is a means to empower teachers and make them more effective decision makers about what goes on in their classrooms. Examples include how teachers ask questions and correct errors, what effect the type of task might have on learning, and whether reading aloud or silent reading in class results in more learning. It is unusual to have carefully controlled experiments such as those one finds in psychology, for example. As the main focus of CCR is on classroom interaction, the research seeks data in the form of both verbal and non-verbal behaviors for analysis to describe, explain, and predict the role of formal classroom instruction in language learning.
Data collection can take several forms.
Of these, it is the first one, the psychometric tradition, which is the most quantitative, involving statistical analysis of numerical data. The other three approaches are more likely to be within the qualitative paradigm, yet may include the counting of numbers of times the teacher talks, for example, thus providing a quantitative dimension. Classroom teachers need not be discouraged from the start, thinking that Research requires one to use inferential statistics. History of Classroom Centered Research Classroom research is not specific to language teaching, having developed in the 1950s in the United States and Britain in an effort to gain insights into what constitutes effective teaching and then to utilize the findings in teacher training. Applied linguists then began to search for other variables in the language classroom which might have a role in effective language learning, and this led to the logical next step of seeking to describe as accurately as possible just what happens in the classroom.