Part One
Introduction
The article revolves around encouraging teachers to adopt a research-oriented perspective in
their classroom practices, shifting from an outsider-in perspective to one that combines both
external and internal viewpoints. He identifies four approaches for teachers to examine their
classroom dynamics: classroom research, action research, teacher research, and exploratory
practice. These approaches involve teachers stepping over their conventional roles to examine
classroom dynamics and question assumptions.
Emic and Etic perspectives
The central theme in Donald’s Freeman perspective is the combination of etic and emic
viewpoints of classroom research. The etic view refers the study of classroom life from an
external perspective, that is, what goes within and between the people in the room in Earl
Stevick’s words (Arnold & Murphey, 2013, p. 73). It researches the classroom from outside in.
The emic viewpoint is teachers inquire their own classrooms, and the life in them, from a
perspective of an insider, the one who’s doing the work.
This distinction depends on the individual’s position within an activity. As a teacher, you are an
insider to your classroom as compared with the researcher who comes to interview and to
collect data from you and your students about what is happening. Additionally, based on the
one’s position, there would an accumulation of different interpretations of the same
phenomenon. This leads to different meaning-making. My short answer is because the
distinction is about meaning, more precisely it is about what participants find meaningful
in a situation. He emphasizes that a holistic understanding of classroom situation requires
combining both perspectives.
The Four Approaches
Action Research: It focuses on rethinking and changing aspects of classroom activity through
iterative cycles, where teachers and students develop a new, shared understanding. It aims to
improve teaching and student learning conditions, driven by the teacher's circumstances.
Burns (2010) provides a guide for practitioners in English language teaching.
Classroom Research: It focuses on documenting and understanding classroom phenomena,
often with an outside researcher. Freeman (1998) discusses balancing teaching with
researching.
Teacher Research: It generates knowledge about teaching and learning from the teacher's
perspective. Cochran-Smith & Lytle (1993, 2009) explore teacher research and knowledge.
Exploratory Practice (EP): It emphasizes understanding and improving the quality of
classroom life by involving all participants and prioritizing their meaning-making. Allwright
(2005) originally proposed EP. Hanks (2017) discusses puzzling about principles and practices.
He further discusses heuristic research, which involves engaging with classroom activities to
improve understanding. He highlights the importance of teachers stepping back, questioning,
and wondering why things in their classroom are happening as they are.
Part Two
1. Proposition: To truly make research a central part of teaching, we must redefine research.
The "teacher" is a person and "research" is a process. Putting the two together with a hyphen
does several things: It creates a person-process, which suggests the agency of the teacher who
takes on a process-research that is different from teaching.
To be and do both is to unite roles by undertaking two processes, teaching and researching, that
have conventionally been separated and seen as distinct.
This separation between teaching and researching is based on a view that the two communities
have very different aims. In the field of education, research is supposed to generate knowledge,
while teachers are supposed to implement it.
Researchers contribute to the understanding and knowledge of a professional community,
while teachers have a community that is based in large measure on activity, defined by their
subject matters, the grade levels or the school settings in which they teach.
In the case of teaching, it is usually other people who set the curriculum, select the materials,
place the students, decide how the job is to be done, and then evaluate it. Most researchers have
far greater control over what they do and how they do it than do their colleagues who are
teachers. Research is concerned with asking questions, examining phenomena, and
documenting understandings for why things happen as they do.
This is unfortunate because, although they may differ in terms of the means they employ to do
their work and even the ends they aim to achieve, the teacher and the researcher can share the
common focus of understanding teaching, learning, and learners within the organized settings
of classrooms and schools.
For teachers, these processes focus on the learning of students; the knowledge established in
classroom teaching is what the students learn through the teaching-learning process. For
teacher-researchers, the processes concentrate on understanding what is going on in
classroom teaching and learning, and the knowledge established reflects those understandings.
To put the connection simply: Teaching seeks knowledge in students as its end; researching
seeks knowledge of teaching-learning processes as a means toward that end.
2. Proposition: Research can be defined as an orientation toward one's practice. It is a
questioning attitude toward the world, leading to inquiry conducted within a disciplined
framework.
This meaning of "discipline" is concerned with how the investigator approaches the question
or phenomenon he or she wants to study. The central notion here is that being disciplined
involves both how one examines something and how one reports or makes public what one has
found through the investigation (replicate the how in order to verify the what).
This takes us back to the two sides of teaching: as doing and as wondering. Are the rules of the
community of teaching defined primarily by action and by what members can do?
The problem is that teaching is not a discipline. It does not have unified or commonly held
"ground rules for creating and testing knowledge," to use Shulman's phrase. In fact, when we
speak of people "teaching a discipline" such as math or biology, we are separating the
knowledge or content from the activity or the teaching.
Experience is the only real reference point teachers share: experiences as students that
influence their views of teaching, experiences in professional preparation, experience as
members of society. This motley and diverse base of experience unites people who teach, but it
does not constitute a disciplinary community. Shulman (1988,) argues that education is not a
discipline but a field of study, which he defines as "a locus containing phenomena, events,
institutions, problems, persons, and processes, which themselves constitute the raw materials
for inquiries of many kinds." (p. 5)
When researched, education in general and teaching in particular is examined through the
lenses of multiple disciplines. When applied to education, these disciplines are themselves
modified by the objects of their investigations.
3. Preposition: Teachers do not think of themselves as producing knowledge; they think of
themselves as using it.
Teachers are seen-and principally see themselves-as consumers rather than producers of
knowledge. Other people write curricula, develop teaching methodologies, create published
materials, and make policies and procedures about education that teachers are called upon to
implement.
People teach people who are learning, which creates a human environment in which the
abstractions of curriculum, materials, and pedagogy are transformed into actual practice.
As educational sociologist Dan Lortie (1975) said, schools are like "egg crates" in which
individual teachers work largely in isolation within their separate rooms with different groups
of students, like eggs in the separate sections of their carton (pp. 13-17).
Teachers learn to talk about what they do, about the techniques and materials they use, about
how students are doing, about local school politics, and so on. These conversations center on
doing; they refer to information about teaching and learning as embedded in local
circumstances and personal experience.
Teacher research makes public these private conversations and individual intuitions,
grounding them in the local circumstances and personal experience of teaching on the one
hand, and in the disciplined procedures of inquiry on the other. Thus, in a very real-sense of
teacher-research is about the creation of a professional disciplinary community.
4. Proposition: Inquiry-and not procedure-is the basis of teacher-research.
They are not paid to understand, document, and generate public knowledge about how
students learn and how best to teach them.
Teacher-research redefines these parameters of teachers' work. When teachers start to puzzle
about what, how, and why they do as they do and to ask questions and speculate about
alternatives, they incorporate the element of inquiry into their work.
Inquiry is a state of being engaged in what is going on in the classroom that drives one to better
understand what is happening-and can happen-there.
Practitioners in these fields learn to puzzle and speculate about what lies outside the realm of
the known (Schon, 1983).
In classrooms, teachers usually have to deal with the new, novel, or unknown without adequate
time, support, or preparation to investigate it. They often have 'to act on the unknown in terms
of what they do know, so that experience plays a key role in shaping action.
Teacher-research comes about when teachers start to define inquiry as a routine and expected
function of their working lives in classrooms. Doing so, however, means rethinking and
restructuring the social organization of teaching and schools. The so-called "egg crate
profession" (Lortie, 1975) is not organized to support inquiry or to foster disciplinary
communities of teaching among practitioners in schools.
5. proposition: Creating a discipline of teaching requires making public one's findings. To do
so teacher-researchers need to explore new and different ways of telling what has been
learned through their inquiries.
When the inquiries and results of teacher-research remain private, they have little impact on
the public domain of teaching or on the ideas or practices of others.
Creating a discipline of teaching requires public sharing and testing of ideas. It requires, as
mentioned in Proposition 2, the ability to present and argue for the results and how they have
been arrived at.
When teacher-researchers adopt existing ways of making public their ideas and findings, using
the current language and genres of scientific debate, for example, they do two things. On the
one hand they gain some access to the prestige and power that these forms of talking and
writing have in society. Teacher-researchers can be taken seriously if they sound like other
researchers. On the other hand, by using these forms of expression teacher-researchers
conform to existing canons and disciplines and thus do not develop their own.
For teacher-researchers to talk and write like researchers gives them access to research
communities; it also constrains them to the issues and ways of thinking that are valued and
meaningful to those communities. Therefore, to see teaching in new ways, teacher-researchers
will need to create new forms of expression. New understandings will need and compel new
forms of expression, new genres, and new forms of public conversation about teaching.
Our first job, therefore, must be to discover and strengthen the indigenous ways of telling what
teachers come to know about teaching and learning through inquiring into their work as
teachers. It is from this position of some strength that teacher-researchers can build an
independent disciplinary community that captures what they are capable of seeing (Freeman,
1996). Simply put, my argument is that to tell a different story, we will need different words.
Part Three
1. Cognitive load theory and English as a medium of instruction
 Cognitive load theory is a psychological theory developed by John Sweller in the late 1980s.
it focuses on how the human brain processes and learns information, especially in
educational settings. The core idea is that our working memory has limited capacity; it can
only handle a certain amount of information at one time. When learning tasks demand more
cognitive resources than the working memory can handle, learning becomes less effective.
 English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) refers to the use of the English language to teach
academic subjects in educational settings where English is not the students’ first language.
In EMI contexts, English is used as the primary language for delivering course content across
various disciplines—such as science, engineering, social sciences, and humanities—while
students actively participate and engage with the material in English.
2. Key concepts related to each theory
 Cognitive load theory:
 Intrinsic Load: This refers to the inherent difficulty of the material itself. It depends on the
complexity of the content and the learner's prior knowledge. For example, studying basic
vocabulary has a lower intrinsic load than understanding advanced scientific concepts.
 Extraneous Load: This is the cognitive effort imposed by how the information is presented.
Poor instructional design, distracting visuals, or unclear explanations increase this load,
hindering learning.
 Germane Load: This is the mental effort dedicated to the process of understanding, schema
construction, and automation. Effective instruction aims to maximize germane load to
promote deep learning.
 EMI:
 Language of Instruction: English serves as the primary language through which teaching,
learning, assessments, and communication occur.
 English Proficiency: EMI does not require students to be fluent in English before starting;
instead, English proficiency develops alongside subject learning.
 Globalization and Internationalization: EMI is increasingly adopted worldwide to foster
international collaboration, improve students' language skills, and enhance graduate
employability.
3. The research focus and questions
Education-oriented research needs to remain vigilant to the varying learners’ levels of
proficiency to implement EMI instructional strategies that efficiently alleviate cognitive strain.
 To analyze the cognitive load imposed by EMI on students in higher education. This objective
aims to understand the types and levels of cognitive demands that EMI places on students
during learning activities.
 To evaluate how cognitive load affects academic performance and comprehension. This
objective seeks to establish the relationship between the cognitive demands experienced
during EMI and students' actual learning outcomes.
 To provide recommendations for effective EMI implementation. This objective aims to
develop practical strategies and guidelines to optimize EMI teaching methods, minimizing
cognitive overload and enhancing learning.
Main Research Questions:
 What levels and types of cognitive load do students experience when studying under
EMI in higher education?
 How does the cognitive load imposed by EMI affect students’ understanding and
retention of course material?
 What differences in cognitive load are observed between students with varying levels of
English language proficiency in EMI settings?
 To what extent does extraneous cognitive load, caused by language difficulties, hinder
academic performance in EMI courses?
 What teaching strategies and instructional design practices can effectively reduce
cognitive load and improve learning outcomes in EMI environments?
4. Teacher-research competence
 Tailoring Language Use and Content Delivery
It shows that extraneous cognitive load is higher due to complex language or unclear
instructions, educators can simplify their language, avoid jargon, and clarify concepts. We can
use plain language, visuals aids, and multimedia tools to make content more accessible,
reducing unnecessary mental effort and allowing students to focus on understanding the
subject matter.
 Implementing Scaffolding and Structured Learning
The main finding is recognizing that intrinsic load is a challenge for students unfamiliar with
both the content and language. We can break complex topics into smaller, manageable
segments, and provide step-by-step guidance. We can use scaffolding techniques such as
graphic organizers, summaries, or checklists to support understanding and reduce cognitive
strain.
 Incorporating Multimodal Resources
The use of visual aids and other multimedia resources can decrease extraneous load. We can
integrate diagrams, videos, and interactive activities that complement verbal explanations,
helping students process information through multiple channels and easing cognitive
demands.
 Providing Language and Academic Support
Non-native students often experience higher extraneous load due to language barriers. We can
offer supplementary language support, such as vocabulary glossaries, language workshops, or
peer mentoring, to help students cope with language demands while learning content.
 Designing Interactive and Active Learning Techniques
Active engagement can promote germane load—mental effort dedicated to understanding. We
can use case studies, group discussions, and problem-solving tasks that encourage students to
apply knowledge actively, fostering schema development and better retention.
 Adjusting Assessment Methods
Cognitive overload can negatively impact performance. We can design assessments that focus
on core understanding rather than language fluency, such as visual-based questions or projectbased evaluations, to allow students to demonstrate knowledge without excessive language
barriers.
 Providing Ongoing Feedback and Monitoring
Identifying students’ perceived cognitive load can help tailor support. We can regular formative
assessments and feedback sessions can help identify students struggling with cognitive
overload, enabling timely intervention.
5. Teacher-research competence
 Deepening Subject Matter Expertise
Conducting research on EMI and cognitive load requires a thorough understanding of both
language acquisition and cognitive psychology. This process broadens expertise in
educational theories, instructional design, and language teaching, fostering knowledgeability
and reflection about teaching practices.
 Developing Research Skills
Designing and implementing studies to measure cognitive load, analyze data, and interpret
findings will sharpen research competencies, including: Formulating research questions,
Designing methodologies (quantitative and qualitative), Data collection and analysis, Critical
thinking and problem-solving.
 Enhancing Critical and Analytical Thinking
Evaluating how cognitive load impacts learning enhances critical analyses, instructional
methods, and student engagement.
The researcher learns how to question assumptions, assess evidence rigorously, and develop
evidence-based strategies—key qualities for a reflective practitioner and researcher.
 Promoting Evidence-Based Teaching Practices
Findings can inform practical enhancements to EMI teaching, making instruction more
effective and student-centered. This aligns with the research-to-practice continuum, fostering
a culture of continuous improvement in teaching.
 Fostering Ethical and Reflective Practice
Conducting research involves ethical considerations and reflective thinking about role as a
teacher. It encourages to become more thoughtful about how your teaching impacts diverse
learner needs and how to adapt accordingly.
7. Increasing Adaptability and Innovation
Studying cognitive load in EMI environments enables to experiment with innovative teaching
methods tailored to students' cognitive and linguistic needs. This adaptability makes the
teacher as a more versatile, creative, and effective educator.