A handbook for Exploratory Action Research

8. What happens?
This chapter focuses on observing and analysing the effects of the ‘new action’ 
introduced in the action research part of your project. We will review different 
ways of collecting data and will consider again how data can be analysed.
We will also look at ways to reflect on what you find and consider its implications. 
In a few words, this chapter focuses on helping you answer the question:
What are the effects of the change(s) that I attempt?
So, whereas findings for exploratory research are connected with the basic 
question ‘What is the current situation?’, your findings for action research will
tell you what happens as a result of the change you implement.

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75 
| What happens?
8.1 Lorena’s story – revisited
Let’s begin by revisiting Lorena Muñoz’ Exploratory Action 
Research project, which you first read about in Chapter Two. 
Read this summary and extract and then do the task that 
follows. 
Lorena noticed that her grade 9–11 students weren’t 
engaging with listening lessons. Her exploratory research 
phase involved surveying the students, conducting a focus 
group interview and getting a student-teacher to observe 
several of her lessons. These revealed that her students 
found the audio topics interesting (something that surprised 
Lorena), but they found many recordings too long and could 
not complete activities. This led to them getting frustrated 
and doing other things, like chatting. She also found that 
they liked songs most of all, simply because they were 
shorter and they were able to complete the task. So she 
started adapting audio tasks to make them more like songs. 
She divided the audios into sections and created activities 
such as ordering the information, filling in gaps, underlining 
the correct word and crossing the odd one out. 
Let’s reread what happened after she implemented her 
action plan:
“By the end of two weeks I observed several changes.
The first one was that they actually did the activities, 
handouts were completed with the correct answers and I 
could observe many hands up to participate in the lesson. 
I conducted another survey in which students answered 
that working with the listening materials as if they were 
songs allowed them to work better. They also said that 
they were able to identify information from the text and 
that the activities they liked the most were underlining the 
correct word, filling in the gaps and crossing out the odd 
one out. They still found it difficult to order the 
information because sometimes the material was too fast. 
The focus group participants mentioned that they now felt 
motivated and more successful because they were able 
to do the tasks, and do them well. This was confirmed by 
another peer observation, where the student-teacher told 
me that students were able to focus on the activities and 
they did not get distracted by anything else.”
Task 8.1 @
Underline or highlight the words or phrases above that
tell us about the evidence Lorena gathered to answer
the question ‘What are the effects of the change(s) that
I attempt?’
Then answer the following questions, either by making 
notes or discussing with a colleague: