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Researching heterogeneity: an account of teacher-initiated research into large classes
Barbra Naidu is a lecturer in English at St Joseph's College, Bangalore. Her interests include classroom methodology and interaction, Indian writing in English, error analysis, and counselling.
K. Neeraja is Head of the Department of English, Maharani Lakshmi Ammanni College, Bangalore. She is currently a member of the coordinating group of the ELTC. She is interested in interactive classroom processes, problems of large classes, and innovative techniques in literature teaching.
Esther Ramani taught scientific communication and supervised research at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore until recently. She is currently interested in constructivism in science and in teachers' conceptions of practice, and in interpretative sociology. She is now Professor of Applied English Language Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Jayagowri Shivakumar is a lecturer in English at N.M.R.K.V. College for Women, Bangalore. Her interests include classroom methodology and interaction and innovative techniques of teaching grammar and literature in large classes.
Vanamala Vishwanatha was a teacher trainer at the Regional Institute of English, Bangalore, and is currently teaching postgraduates at Bangalore University. Her interests are literature teaching in first and second language contexts, translation, and women's studies.
This paper is a description of the first collaborative research project of a self-initiated teacher development group in South India. All five members who undertook this research are practising teachers who, at one time or another in their professional lives, have taught ESL classes of over a hundred students at pre-university or undergraduate level. This paper illustrates their use of talk to make sense of their collective teaching experience by focusing on the central issue of heterogeneity. The paper spells out the dialogic process initiated and sustained by the group over eight months, during which the members developed their initial anecdotal accounts into a complex understanding of their pedagogic hypotheses and principles. The cognitive and social value of the group's interaction, the insights from its research, and the modes of facilitative talk and writing it evolved might be useful to teacher-researchers in other contexts.
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