further ponderings on my research topic

Picture the scene. A busy restaurant, a long table. Not a family outing, a work meal. What is the collective noun for a group of ESOL tutors?

I was sat around the middle of the table, opposite my fellow CELTA tutors. Looking to my right I noticed everyone, yes everyone, had completed their CELTA with us and when I pointed this out to my colleague he looked to the other half of the room to find that everyone, bar TWO people, had completed either the CELTA of the DTE(E)LLS with us. What's the collective noun for a home grown group of ESOL tutors?

Over the years, as new tutors have joined the team, it has become increasingly rare for our CELTA graduates to get jobs within the college, and with the removal of the need to gain the DT(E)LLS the ratio of home gown to externally trained teachers has shifted. Until this year, when I am so delighted that two graduates from the last cohort have joined the ESOL team.

This reminiscing brings me to my EdD. I am at the proposal writing stage, so two questions at the forefront of my thinking are 'What do I want to research and what will be the original contribution?'

Up until this morning, central in my thoughts was the use of syncronised chat in teaching practice. I am drawn to this for several reasons. It is something new, it's directly related to my practice & it involves a technology that I believe creates opportunities for learning which wouldn't exist if the technology didn't exist. After three meetings with my supervisor, I was finally able to hear her advice that this was not big enough for a doctoral study. I needed to position this use of technology more broadly and this fit with the reading I'd been doing on models of teacher education and the role of observation and reflective practice. My draft research questions are:

• Are teacher education courses able to develop teachers' reflective skills?
• Does the CELTA course facilitate reflective thinking?
• Does syncronised chat during TP influence reflective thinking/conversations, if so, how?

With this in mind, I have continued reading, reading, reading and this has taken me in all sorts of directions: lesson study; peer observation in HE; philosophies and histories of teacher education; and a continued hunt for studies on the CELTA.

Then, yesterday, I looked back over the CELTA articles I'd  already found and saw there was a gap in the literature relating to CELTA graduates, and what research has been done relates to graduates working internationally. Which has got me thinking about the UK FE context. As yet I have not found anything on CELTA graduates who transition into the UK ESOL profession.

This sounds really exciting and a potential research question could be 'How do graduates from a part time CELTA transition into English Language Teaching in the UK?'

BUT ......

this does not lend itself to action research. This past 12 months I have felt the pull/push of action research and the struggles of putting the research question before the methodology. Which brings me back to what has drawn me to the questions about reflective practice, observation and the use of syncronised chat in TP. I can see how this would fit an action research methodology.

And to be honest, I am now starting to feel very nervous that the vast amount of reading I've done, rather than help me narrow down my research questions is opening up more and more. The enormity of it all is looming large.