The divide between practitioners and academics has been largely debated and critiqued. However, with this presentation, I wish to share my experience as an academic practitioner and illustrate the rationale for partnerships between applied linguistics academics and practitioners to work together and produce more powerful research insights.
Whilst practitioner research has gained momentum, guidance is required for teachers who wish to research their own classrooms or for academics who support teachers in such endeavours. I will report on a study of 6 international students who joined a pre-sessional programme before commencing a postgraduate course in the UK. Initially, I was their pre-sessional teacher, and during this programme I adopted Exploratory Practice to investigate their motivation to study and live in the UK. At the end of this programme, I followed them throughout their postgraduate year, this time, as a narrative researcher who organised several rounds of interviews. Having worn the teacher and researcher hats, I wish to draw upon this experience to raise and answer questions such as what are the key challenges and affordances of practitioner research? Who benefits from practitioner research? What ethical dilemmas might one face? I will argue that, as teachers, we are well-placed to conduct research with our own students, showing how teacher-research done within one’s educational context can illuminate phenomena that an ‘external’ researcher may not see. In this light, a ‘small-lens approach’ to research (Ushioda, 2016) may offer insights which more traditional approaches within Applied Linguistics may not capture. At the same time, I will discuss the need for teacher-researchers to receive some kind of research training in order to develop a repertoire of research skills which, combined with an ethical teacher sensitivity, offer a formidable pathway for successful, useful and ethically sound research. In other words, practitioners can offer applied linguistics the insider-knowledge and understandings that traditional research approaches may not fully grasp, and academics can offer tools and perspectives from academic research which may support practitioners’ inquiries.
