UNDERSTANDING AND REFLECTION OF ISSUES IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION RESEARCH

This article discusses issues in social sciences research which serve as an introductory framework of understanding and reflection especially for beginning researchers in the field of English language education. It commences by addressing choices, decisions and factors involved when doing research. These include such variables as power relations, ethical issues, research design, claims to truth in research, and methodological considerations in research. The article ends with the reflection on these issues for carrying out research in Indonesian English language teaching context.


POWER RELATIONS
Power relations are a very controversial construct because it is omnipresent, changeable, reversible, and instable (Obiorah, Olibie, & Wenceslaus, 2010).Foucault (1980, cited in Obiorah et al., 2010), connecting power and knowledge, stated that the relation between power and knowledge is discursive: "the more power, the more knowledge; the more knowledge, the more power".Similarly, Roussel (2005)  Such a style is also indicated by the dominant use of active forms and pronouns (Hertz, 1996;Jones 1992;Gitlin & Russell, 1994).
In addition, power relation is more intensified in teacher research which has gained prominence since the last two decades (Zeni, 1998;Stocker, 2012).Teacher research refers to teachers as the agents who conduct the study involving their own students, despite the different orientations taken (Stocker, 2012).In such a research context, students are usually identified as "vulnerableespecially if their families have little money or education" (Zeni, 1998), a "relatively captive population" (Moreno, 1998) "people of a lower social status" (Erickson, 2006), those who "feel under pressure to give up their free time and take part in an activity that may potentially make them feel uncomfortable" (Taber (2007), and those who are in "the dynamic mix of personal ties and multiple social roles, statuses, and purposes" with the teacher who are also the researcher (Stocker, 2012: 55)."critical approach", which argues that "both school and society need to be freed from manipulation, repression and domination and that the researcher should play an active role in helping to achieve that freedom" (Kilpatrick, 1988: 22).These second and last trends have contributed significantly in language education research within the last two decades as shown in many international professional journals and publications in the field (Richards, 2009).
The third definition treats an aspect of paradigms as shared beliefs within a community of researchers who agree about which questions are most significant and which procedures are most appropriate to answer the questions.A community of researchers may be defined as that comprising "practitioners of a scientific specialty" devoted in the same technical literature (Morgan, 2007: 53).For example, in English language teaching, one community of researchers may focus on comprehensively describing of the linguistic nature of language, cognition, and discourse as a basis for informing curriculum contents (Cumming, 1994), while the other research community focuses on the pedagogic aspects including the application of communicative language teaching, classroom dynamics, teacher talks and learner interactivity aiming at optimizing students" mastery of the target language (Richards, 2009).shown in Table 1.These criteria and techniques have appeared to be a consensus up to the present as they continue to be mentioned mainstream qualitative literature (e.g., Creswell, 2009;Creswell & Miller, 2000;Patton, 2002;Maxwell, 2005;Maxwell, 2009;Merriam, 2009;Yin, 2011;as cited in Loh, 2013).

REFLECTION: DOING LANGUA-GE EDUCATION RESEARCH IN INDONESIA
Having gone through the series of literature, I now describe some issues in carrying out research in  et al., 2012;Solihin, 2012;Jalaluddin, 2012).In other words, English language, which is traditionally a rote-learnt subject, has emerged as a living language used as a tool of daily communication and interaction in places usually associated with English as a foreign language.
Second, regarding the issue of

Second
in doing research has to do with various views on the essence of truth or the status claims of knowledge and the conceptualization of "validity" and "reliability" or "trustworthiness".Views on the essence of truth are related to the kind of research "paradigms" a researcher embraces.In research literature, paradigms have captured a lot of definitions, which Morgan (2007: 51-54) have categorized into four, from the broadest to the most specific.The broadest definition views paradigms as worldviews, i.e. the researchers" thoughts as a basic set of assumptions forming the nature of research and guiding their inquiries.In other words, paradigms as worldviews refer to the influence of individual researchers" awareness or knowledge on topics researchers chosen to be investigated.Thus, in real life, people may claim truth based on the empirical reality as well logical and normative considerations.In this regard, Heap (1995) proposes two claims of truth in human sciences which differ from "empirical inquiries".The first is termed "logical claims", indicating a necessary relation of at least two conceptual elements in a proposition.The second claim is called "normative claims" which rely for their truth on knowledge agreed upon in a particular community or context.A normative claim, therefore, is a contingent relation which is not a necessary one, as expressed in a logical claim.These two claims of truth are labeled as "a priori ones".

Finally
in installing fiber optic cables along all national roads in the region, as well as private cellular phone companies that allow even isolated areas in the region to have internet connections.From the various resources, for example, we can see that there is a trend in language teaching in the world, though it has been frowned upon at the national level since recently, about internationalization of schools whereby English is used as the medium of instruction for math, sciences and some other subjects (e.g., other resources, building networks with tourist resorts and centers, and being committed to joining English camps or living temporarily in English villages that require English as the language of interaction (Jazadi figuring out their position as a stakeholder and the position of the research within the national and international trends.The writer"s reflection about conducting research in Indonesia, especially in West Nusa Tenggara educational context, is admittedly not thorough yet, but shows the complexity of the challenges for doing research that responds to the need for improving educational quality in the region.It may still be a long way for most researchers in the region to produce credible research.However, with the availability of the information technology or the internet and the requirement for university graduates to publish their academic work in journals in conjunction with the strengthening of anti-plagiarism regulation, the development of the humanity and action-based research to the right

Table 1
Criteria and Techniques for achieving trustworthiness in qualitative research Researching language and literacy in social context (pp.18-25).Cleveland, UK: Multilingual Matters -the Open University.