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'Research is for teachers? You must be joking!' - IATEFL webinar, 2 December 2017

This was a presentation in IATEFL's monthly webinar series, and was attended by 304 unique visitors. The recording is only accessible to IATEFL members, via the IATEFL website. However, powerpoints and a summary are below, together with links to related resources.

Powerpoint slides here / Links to related resources below

webinar photo

Good summary by Lizzie Pinard - thanks Lizzie!


1. Context: recent arguments and some history

Arguments

‘“More research is needed”: a mantra too far?’ (article by Alan Maley, 2016)

‘The (ir)relevance of academic research for the language teacher’. (article by Péter Medgyes, ELT Journal 71/4, 2017; not open access, but abstract is available here)

History

Harold E. Palmer biography

The Scientific Study and Teaching of Languages by Harold E. Palmer (1917) [may be slow to download]

‘The history of teaching English as a foreign language, from a British and European perspective’ (by A.P.R. Howatt & Richard Smith)

Michael West biography

Blog post on Palmer's The Scientific Study and / longer article on Palmer's 'alternative applied linguistics'

‘Harold E. Palmer, IRLT, and "historical sense" in ELT’ (by Richard Smith)

Plenary by Henry Widdowson: ‘Disciplinarity and disparity in applied linguistics’. at 50th British Association for Applied Linguistics annual meeting, University of Leeds, 2017


2. Research for ELT – 'ELT research'

TESOLacademic.org

ELT Research bites

British Council ELT research database project (2005–12) (now out-of-date)

British Council ELT research papers

IATEFL Research SIG 

TELCnet: Teaching English in Large Classes network

'Pedagogy of autonomy for difficult circumstances' (by Kuchah Kuchah and Richard Smith, 2011)

'Researching teacher associations' (by Richard Smith & Kuchah Kuchah, 2016)


3. Teacher-research in ELT

Teaching in Low-resource Classrooms: Voices of Experience (edited by Richard Smith, Amol Padwad & Deborah Bullock)

Champion Teachers: Stories of Exploratory Action Research (edited by Paula Rebolledo, Richard Smith & Deborah Bullock)

A Handbook for Exploratory Action Research (by Richard Smith & Paula Rebolledo, forthcoming: January 2018)

Children and Teachers as Co-researchers in Indian Primary Classrooms (by Annamaria Pinter, Rama Mathew & Richard Smith)

'Teachers Research!: Posters, Talks, Discussions' (record of the first IATEFL Research SIG 'Teachers Research!' event, April 2014)

'By teachers for teachers: innovative, teacher-friendly publishing of practitioner-research' (by Richard Smith, Paula Rebolledo, Deborah Bullock & Andrea Robles)

Teachers Research! Facebook page

IATEFL Research SIG e-books (collections of teacher-research reports)

International Festival of Teacher-research in ELT

TESOL CALL-IS Electronic Village Online (EVO): Clasroom-based research for professional development (Jan.-Feb,2018)

Feedback welcome: R.C.Smith@warwick.ac.uk