Challenges Faced in Conducting Evaluation and Research: Experiences of English in Action in Bangladesh

This paper discusses some of the challenges faced by the English in Action (EIA) project while carrying out evaluation and research on its activities in Government schools in Bangladesh. EIA is a large-scale communicative English language education programme which conducts evaluation to ascertain impact on its beneficiaries and find out how this impact is achieved, and more exploratory-style research to understand the context in which the project operates. In particular, for the schools component large-scale quantitative evaluation studies measure change in classroom practice, English language proficiency, and views of teachers and students participating in the programme, while smaller-scale qualitative studies look at the nature of change. Other small-scale studies have a research element which explores the context and other relevant factors, for example, the intricacies of the daily lives of teachers and students. This paper outlines some of the challenges faced in conducting evaluation and research – such as the ‘reactive’ effect when conducting classroom observation, and multi-level interpretation – and the proactive way EIA deals with these.