Abstract

This paper begins by outlining the history of action research before arguing about the workability of action research in China’s foreign language teaching and research. It reveals the challenges that front-line teachers in China face, such as high research pressure, heavy teaching tasks, a lack of research guidelines, and insufficient teamwork, based on a survey of 273 foreign language teachers in colleges and universities from 24 provinces (/autonomous regions/municipalities directly under the central government) in China. After that, 37 papers published in CSSCI publications about foreign language teaching between 1994 and 2018 are reviewed, and recommendations for future action research in China are offered. Finally, the action-research model of “classroom-oriented research and research-based classroom teaching” is proposed as an achievable research framework for front-line teachers, incorporating information technology, multimodal teaching materials, and curriculum and course reforms under the guidelines of pedagogy, psychology, and linguistics.

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