British Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 1 December 2011, Vol. 3 (1) © 2011 British Journals ISSN 2048-1268 Action Research as the Basis for Language Curriculum Development Laleh Fakhraee Faruji Department of Literature and Foreign Languages, Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch, Tehran, Iran Abstract Action research focuses simultaneously on action and research. The action aspect requires some kind of planned intervention, deliberately putting into place concrete strategies, processes, or activities in the research context (Burns, 2007, p. 987). This paper first describes the origins of action research and its basic characteristics, and then investigates the role of action research in language curriculum development. Keywords: Action Research, Action Research Spiral, Curriculum Development Introduction Action research is seen as a means towards better understanding of problematic social situations and improving the quality of human interactions and practices within those situations (Burns, 2005). It is now common in different disciplinary fields and national contexts, including the field of applied linguistics and ELT. Today, the role of a teacher is changing rapidly from a traditional perspective to a modern one. Instead of being just a follower of new methodologies, teachers are the source and creator of the theoretical basis of their own implementation techniques (Sarac-Suzer, 2007). Therefore, teachers are becoming both practitioners and theorists of today’s language teaching profession. This paper first describes the origins of action research and its basic characteristics, and then investigates the role of action research in language curriculum development. The origins of action research in educational contexts was based on Dewey’s (1929, as cited in Burns, 2005) arguments against the separation of theory and practice in the first part of the twentieth century. Educational action research concentrates on development of curriculum, professional improvement, and application of learning in a social context (as cited in Hien, 2009). In fact, Dewey set up a “Laboratory School” at the University of Chicago for his experiments with democracy and education (McKernan, 2008, p. 15). This approach was a democratic ideal, which gave autonomy to local schools and teachers for creating and recreating their curricula. A historical examination of action research over the later 60 years reveals a large number of definitions, interpretations and uses, influenced by the thinking of the times. The social psychologist, Lewin (1954, as cited in Burns, 2005) who has been called the ‘father’ of action research has described action research as a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action and fact-finding about the result of the action. Lewin’s view of the role that socially motivated enquiry could play encompassed industry, the military, and a whole range of other political and economic systems. However, in the field of English language teaching, action research is a relatively recent phenomenon which has been emerged in the literature since the late 1980s (Burns, 2005). In the early 1980s, Breen and Candlin’s proposals that curriculum evaluation should be an integral aspect of classroom teaching and learning provided the background for shifts towards an action research orientation. Towards the end of the 1980s, van Lier (1988, as cited in Burns, 2007, p. 992) argued for “ethnographic monitoring” of classroom curriculum processes and, pointed out that action research had not so far received serious attention as a distinct style of research in language teaching.