Language education at all levels benefits from research in a multitude of ways. Conversely, educational practices and experiences offer fertile ground for research into language learning, teaching and assessment. This book views research in language education as a reciprocal venture that should benefit all participants equally. Practice is shaped by theory, which in turn is illuminated and refined by practice. The book brings together studies from different fields of language education in nine countries on four continents: Cameroon, Canada, Finland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan and Sweden. The authors report on research that depends on the active involvement of teachers, teacher educators and learners of different ages and various backgrounds. The book focuses on projects designed to address challenges in the classroom and on the role of learners as collaborative agents in the research process as well as collaborative research in professional development and the role of collaborative research in the development of national policy.
This book is concerned with the reciprocal benefits that accrue from effective collaboration between the various actors in language education – teachers and researchers but also learners and policy makers: the fruitful interdependence of policy aims and pedagogical goals and approaches on the one hand and research purposes and methodologies on the other. At the same time, challenges are addressed, not least the gulf that so often separates applied linguistic and other educational research from classroom practice (most recently,Sato and Loewen 2022) and policy-related frame factors like curricula and assessment (van denAkker 2003). There is a growing tendency to argue that we need more teaching-informed research (e.g.,Rose 2019). This implies modes of collaboration between policy makers, schools, teachers and learners on the one hand and researchers on the other that are mutually beneficial, mutually respectful, mutually relevant, non-exploitative and ethically aware. Quality and validity in educational research should promote quality and validity in educational practice and vice versa, with reciprocity and ethics assumed to be intrinsic aspects of these concepts (Hammersley 2017). These considerations determined our recruitment of contributions to the book. Arranged in four sections –Addressing challenges in the classroom,Learners as collaborative agents,Collaborative research in professional development, andCollaborative research and national policy – the twelve chapters report on research in a wide variety of educational contexts in eight countries on three continents: Canada, Finland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan and Sweden. They have in common a core commitment to reciprocity and relevance and an awareness of the many ethical challenges posed by classroom research. In her afterword, Ema Ushioda reviews the twelve chapters from an ethical perspective.
The first part of the book reports on collaborative research that seeks solutions to specific pedagogical problems. Chapter 1, by Jessica Berggren, Silvia Kunitz, Malin Haglind, Amanda Hoskins, Anna Löfquist and Hanna Robertson, describes a Swedish project funded by the local school authorities and designed to stimulate spontaneous oral interaction in the language classroom. The researchers hypothesized that pupils’ reluctance to engage in reciprocal communication was due to the kind of tasks they were asked to perform. Working closely with teachers, the researchers proposed a cyclical approach – task design, implementation, analysis – that was intended to reduce the gap between theory and practice and strengthen the ecological validity of the projec
