Project Aims

How we help language teachers develop research literacy

Creating learning opportunities

We will design a series of blended learning and self-instruction modules to help teachers develop research literacy. These modules will address competences and skills which are relevant to research-related practices, whether this is about ‘consuming’ or ‘producing’ research.

We will pilot these resources in universities and schools that participate in the ReaLiTea project, but we intend to make these broadly available as open educational resources so that anyone can use them.

Making research accessible

Building on existing expertise (e.g., the OASIS project), we will produce plain-language summaries of existing research in language education and applied linguistics. These research digests will help teachers access high-impact research, which is often inaccessible due to publisher paywalls and challenging language.

Building communities

We will develop and foster an online space as a hub for a digital ELT teacher community of practice. We hope to see this develop into a space for international collaboration aiming at the production of classroom-based knowledge.

Tracking personal development

We will develop measures of research literacy, which second and foreign language education professionals can use to structure their personal growth. We envisage a framework of development categories and benchmarks, which teachers can use for self assessment and identifying priorities for development. In addition, we expect that this framework will enable teacher educators to align their teaching with measurable criteria.

Curating models

We will create and curate a corpus of research outputs that are relevant to language education. We envisage that this will include a broad range of outputs, such as research articles, reflective reports, conference presentations and other more. We expect that this will not only provide insights into various teaching contexts, but it may also inspire practitioner research by showcasing examples of good practice.