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British Council ELT research database project (2005–12) (now out-of-date)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