Language teachers report having limited direct contact with research findings despite generally having positive perceptions of research. We will discuss how OASIS summaries can be used to facilitate interaction between research and pedagogy, by providing examples of and suggestions for their use.
Language teachers report having limited direct contact with research and research findings despite generally positive perceptions of research (Borg, 2009; Marsden & Kasprowicz, 2017; Nassaji, 2012). Key reasons teachers give are 1) practical – a lack of time and access, and 2) conceptual – academic papers can be difficult to read (Plavén-Sigray et al., 2017). In turn, researchers worry that their research is not (or does not need to be) relevant to pedagogy. This contribution presents one large-scale initiative to bridge some research-pedagogy divides: Open Accessible Summaries in Language Studies (OASIS; http://oasis-database.org/). OASIS aims to facilitate interaction between research and pedagogy, by making research into language learning, language teaching, and multilingualism physically and conceptually accessible.The freely available, one-page OASIS summaries, written in non-technical language, provide information about what the study was about, its importance, what the researcher(s) did and found. Three major international journals now require authors to write these summaries (Language Learning, The Modern Language Journal, and TESOL Quarterly), and many others encourage their authors to write them. We discuss how OASIS summaries have contributed to professional development activities, focusing on their role in a large UK government funded initiative: the National Centre for Excellence for Language Pedagogy (http://www.ncelp.org/). We describe how summaries have been used in packages of professional development activities with teachers and teacher educators and in self-organised teacher groups. We provide data on teacher confidence and attitudes to the professional development and a frank account of some of the challenges. References Borg (2009). EL teachers’ conceptions of research. Applied Linguistics, 30, 355–88. Marsden & Kasprowicz (2017) FL educators’ exposure to research. The MLJ, 101, 613-642. Nassaji (2012) The relationship between SLA research and language pedagogy. Language Teaching Research, 16, 337-365. Plavén-Sigray, Matheson, Schiffler, Thompson (2017). Research: The readability of scientific texts is decreasing over time. eLife,6.
