the effect of action research on developing efl teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge

Despite the fact that action research (ar) has been considered important in professional development of second/foreign language (l2) teachers, it is surprising that it has not received much attention in the l2 literature as a source of pedagogical content knowledge (pck). in order to fill this gap and find out how ar can contribute to the development of pck in l2 education, the present study aims to investigate the experience of a group of iranian english-as-a-foreign-language (efl) teachers who conducted ar in their classroom contexts. the present study adopted a case study design which is categorized under the general qualitative research paradigm. in this way, every teacher in the present study was considered a case whose experience with respect to conducting ar in his classroom became the focus of attention to find out whether it has any effect on the development of pck. the participants were three male efl teachers who were teaching general english courses at a private english language teaching institute. the instrument used to gather data for the present study was semi-structured interview. the semi-structured interviews were first transcribed and then coded with respect to different categories of knowledge as they emerged in the data. the findings of the present study highlight the positive effect of doing ar on increasing different types of knowledge of efl teachers. more specifically, it was shown that conducting ar contributes to increasing efl teachers’ knowledge about their students and subject matter. in this way, the needs analysis stage of the ar study provided teachers with opportunities to build their knowledge of their students through observation and reflection. yet the pedagogical knowledge of teachers was improved and expanded through finding out about new teaching methodologies and strategies which was possible because of the ar study.