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.
Description helps the teacher avoid taking a prescriptive perspective on practices.
In this view, aspects of the wider sociocultural context within which the classroom is situated are to be analyzed, and the focus shifts from the teacher to the learner, who is seen as an important contributor and organizer of the learning environment. This perspective takes the researcher into the community and the society as a whole to look at the wider domain in which formal education functions. A study of error correction, for example, requires linguistic analysis of the learners' contributions as well as interaction analysis of teacher-learner behavior. In the next section, I will describe an approach to carrying out small research studies, called action research. Action research is one form of CCR which is seen as being small scale and situational, that is, focused on a particular problem, to try to understand and perhaps solve some concrete problem in an individual teacher's classroom.