In order to propose variation in pedagogical approaches to second language writing instruction, I describe the method I have been using to teach community-based research. The English Center, in Oakland, California, is an intensive English language program that serves an unusually diverse immigrant community. Working with motivated high-intermediate- and advanced-level students in small classes has allowed me to integrate research writing into my academic classes. I can draw on experience teaching research writing since 2007. Most of the examples used in this article are taken from the student-generated text New Immigrants Experiences in 2011: A Community Based Research Study.  A research team of ESL students worked over a period of 2 months to write a 30-page community-based academic paper applying APA style. All of these college-bound students had been educated abroad through high school or undergraduate programs in technical fields and had been living in an English-speaking country less than 1 year. The research team—composed of new immigrants, refugees, and asylees—conducted research on their own school and immigrant communities.

My hope is that what follows will help writing instructors think through the process and evaluate the method. I hold the position that the community-based research method allows college-level writers to apply valuable integrated and critical thinking skills and helps them form more sophisticated and engaged learning communities. It refocuses the role of the language learner as a networked community leader because it advances a writer’s institutional authority to make a claim of scientific truth. Here I describe the basic steps I have used to teach community-based research, which parallel traditional social scientific research methods, and discuss some possibilities and special difficulties for second language writing instructors.

Introducing Primary Research

The process begins with the generation of a research question. In primary research, it must be possible for the research team to answer the question by analyzing the data from the environment. In the case of community-based research, the important question will be answered by and for a community that is being revealed in the process of the study. How global warming is causing a rise in seawater levels is not a realistic question for community-based research. However, thinking through the possibilities for research helps the students schematize academic disciplines and formulate social scientific and cultural studies. Community-based research highlights the way that members of a community, not only those with special authorization, can ask and answer their own questions.

The best research questions for community-based research are those that can be answered by people in the students’ lives: family members, friends, coworkers, teachers, classmates. ESL students may also collect data from their globally networked communities by using the Internet and the support of their families or former coworkers. What participants think, feel, and say when they reflect on the question becomes the data. Here are some examples of successful research questions:

• How do the people express lack of understanding?
• How do older learners adapt to being in school again?
• How do new immigrants feel about life in the United States during an economic downturn?
• How do refugees’ experiences differ from immigrants’ experiences during the first year in the United States?

This leads to the most important next step—the data collection instrument. The student researchers need to make lists composed of more specific questions that are not only on topic and answerable, but not too obvious or repetitive. They need to imagine the constraints of the respondents, such as the time it will take to participate. These conceptual challenges require students to anticipate answers and evaluate their usefulness while drafting the questions. Qualitative research requires a sophisticated interplay of inductive and deductive reasoning as the researchers form and reform their thesis.

This is the strategic time for the instructor to present a scholarly article both as a model of the process and as a way to help the students generate meaningful categories to explore their topic with some complexity. However, simplified research papers are not easy to locate. I resorted to making abridgements of my own research papers and revising former student work.

Collecting and Using Data

Traditionally, data can be collected in three ways: observations, interviews, and surveys. Interviews give the advantage of interaction. Students can work together to plan interviews with individuals who have special points of view on the research topic. For example, they might plan to interview individuals from different ethnic groups, men and women, citizens and noncitizens, depending on the research question. The researchers schedule appointments and take field notes on authentic interaction. Interviewers can start with simple questions and refocus as the interview progresses. They include visual observations in their notes. They make tables of the results. Then the interview team members bring their data together to look for interesting differences and trends.

Survey instruments have the advantage of collecting more people’s experiences and keeping statistical records. These statistical results can be made into graphs with Excel and presented in the paper and in visual presentation formats. Students writing surveys should make use of free online software. Students in my classes used SurveyMonkey, which provides a link to the survey and automatically updates tables of the results. It also keeps records of written responses. The online survey designed by the 2011 research team was posted as links on social media and sent by email to friends and former students. Using this method, they collected survey and demographic data from 64 respondents in about one week. With the support of the school’s computer lab, most respondents were classmates, but alumni and friends also participated.

The 2011 survey was divided into five sections: language issues, finances, health, citizenship, and demographic information. The survey sections became the content areas assigned to individuals and small groups as the project progressed. Content sections also helped me organize a master document for the drafting phase. Dividing the labor for hands-on data collection activities also informed the methods section. Students explained their roles and parts to one another, and other students had the job of summarizing the data collection process: the research site, participants, researcher roles, data collection methods, and data analysis methods.

There are several benefits to the group activity for critical thinking and community building. Because the students participate in the process of data collection and consider the reliability of their own and one another’s data, they learn to question the usefulness and reliability of any data. This reliability check can then be applied to the evaluation of sources of information in the background section of their paper. In these specific ways, the students are being socialized into methods of analysis with protocols and intellectual traditions. Student leadership emerges based on individuals’ abilities to describe and guide the process, not solely on institutional roles or individual skills.

Organizing and Tracking Student Progress

While directing students through the sections of a research paper, explaining conventions, and contributing to forms of reasoning, there are still challenges for assessing a group project in which labor is divided—scheduling due dates, charting and tracking progress, and making evaluations. A shared Google document let me outline the paper’s sections, assign those sections to individual students, watch progress, and suggest revisions. With color-coded records, the Google doc allowed me to see exactly which students were logging in to draft or paste text, and the date and time each student writer began. The students adapted to the transparency of writing and editing a shared document.

There are other useful approaches to guiding and evaluating participation. Weekly quizzes on instructional presentations focus on skill development and the meta-language the researchers need to plan the group work. Reflective checklists, schemas of the process, and daily oral progress reports are practical. Communicating the instructor’s intellectual engagement during oral progress reports keeps the students motivated.

Presenting Findings, Analysis, and Discussion

There are many layers of details in the presentation and analysis of data. In community-based research, the writing is based not on the conventions for recycling other’s ideas, but on describing their own hard-won data. This step applies the students’ much-practiced academic skills. Qualitative data can be presented in quotations, paraphrases, and tables, while statistical data can be presented in tables and graphs and summarized in text.

After a disciplined presentation of data and analyses of trends, section by section, the 2011 researchers had the basis for making sound policy recommendations in their discussion section. According to their research, new immigrants report the need for more financial support and less stress during English language instruction. Problems making friends and financial pressures were significant for the newest immigrants and cause learning problems. In addition, new immigrants said they needed to learn about existing social services that could help them meet their basic needs. Immigrants also reported being unaware of paths to citizenship and the personal benefits of citizenship. To meet specific needs, the students recommended curricular changes, especially to help immigrants foster meaningful relationships and more government support for immigrants’ education.

Publishing and Community-Building

Ideally, publishing is the most empowering step in the research writing process. There should be members of the community who are interested in reading and responding to the students’ research. To address the needs expressed in the 2011 project, the English Center invited partnering agencies to inform the students about personal safety, social welfare services, and citizenship and legal services. I wanted students to see that their efforts to describe these needs were improving their community.

A few trends arose in the data that informed my own ideas about students’ learning needs. For example, personal growth, not U.S. citizenship, was revealed as the most significant reason for seeking residency in the United States. Some participants said that economic conditions, not national affiliations, would determine their place of residence in the future. Developing cross-cultural friendships, technology skills, and fluency in languages were identified as important to their well-being and social mobility. Evidently, education in the United States was a stepping stone to a cosmopolitan identity and better economic opportunity, not a goal in itself. Findings such as these, if made known to the community, could inform educational policies and challenge the status quo.

Conclusion

Integrating a community-based research project into second language writing instruction should reveal several positive values for college writing preparation and for practical community engagement. Even if a research project is much smaller than the one I have described, the steps can be implemented with positive effect. First, generating a research question and drafting data collection instruments begin the complex process of trial and error. They shift from being students at school to being to a community research group. Dividing responsibilities for data collection and drafting the sections of the paper foster oral language, group facilitation, and higher order reasoning skills. Academic writing conventions, such as signaling and citing sources, which may have been practiced in isolation, find an authentic application. Social media such as Facebook enable data collection. Shared documents provide group a forum so that students learn from one another and allow the instructor to guide and track progress. Hands-on primary research brings attention to critical questions of reliability and objectivity that can be applied when evaluating all sources of information. Students also begin to see the social world more objectively as they analyze their data and reflect and describe their group processes. Finally, through research writing, the learning community becomes a means to participate in authentic inquiry that promises to have the power to improve that community.

In significant ways, the students are socialized into intellectual traditions that begin in school but do not remain in school. Research newly contextualizes speaking, reading, and writing skills that have been developing over years of schooling. This research writing process is not an easy one because it reformulates relationships and alters concepts of knowledge construction. A large project with many linked components challenges learners’ organizational abilities after years of piecemeal practice. Among its values, community-based research shifts the goal of writing from institutional authority to network the learning community beyond the classroom.

Janice Tolman is an academic skills instructor at the English Center, in Oakland, California. She holds an MA in English and a certificate in applied linguistics. She studied educational research at the University of California, Berkeley.