ReaLiTea: September 2024 update

If you’ve been following this blog long enough, you might know that I am involved in the Research Literacy of Teachers project, or ReaLiTea. This is a multi-university initiative to increase the teachers’ ability to engage with, and in, knowledge-building about language teaching. This post is an update on some of the exciting things that we have been preparing in the project, and a preview on exciting developments that are still ahead.

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Why we need teacher research literacy

Before I list some of the developments in the project, I’d like to say a few things about why we consider research literacy important.

The research – teaching gap

For a long time, research in applied linguistics has been drifting apart from teaching practice. This is not necessarily a bad thing, in terms of widening our understanding of how language works. However, it does create a divide between the world of language teaching and the world of language and teaching research.

This divide, in turn, has two unfortunate effects. Firstly, it alienates teachers who might understandably feel that there is not much they can gain from engaging with research output. Secondly, it means that a lot of the important things that happen inside classrooms are no longer in focus.

Disempowered teachers

At the same time, the teaching profession is under sustained attack from powerful forces outside education. Whether it is parents who question the value of our syllabus or policy-makers who question the value of our schools, there is no shortage of people who want to shape education according to their understandings and agendas. Disempowered teachers, who are confined to the unthinking transmission of information, cannot counterbalance such pressures, and consequences can be dire.

Rethinking the role of teachers

The answer to many of the issues above, I believe, lies in re-imagining the role of teachers. Our educational systems need teachers who can speak with confidence and authority about the topics that matter to them. If there’s truth to the cliche that ‘knowledge is power’, we need teachers who can access the collective knowledge of the profession and transform it into locally relevant understandings. We also need teachers who can transform their classrooms into sites of knowledge production, where good practice emerges for sharing across the profession. And finally, we need teacher networks where counterdiscourses to apathy, cynicism, and poor policy can be articulated.

But I digress… Back to the ReaLiTea project and the update on the things we’ve been doing.

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Progress made

The Teacher Research Literacy Development Framework

One of the main deliverables of the ReaLiTea project is a Teacher Research Literacy Development Framework (we’re still looking for a snappier name, suggestions are welcome!). This is a set of competences that connected to research literacy, and descriptors of different competence levels. We expect that this will help teachers identify their strengths and areas where improvement is possible. It is also likely to be useful for teacher educators as a course planning or assessment tool. We had expected to share this in early 2026, but we are happy to see that an alpha version is already complete. This should be ready for piloting, after we implement the feedback from our meeting.

Learning materials
for teacher reserach literacy

Several project teams are involved in preparing learning materials that can be used for autonomous study or in class. A lot of progress has been made on this front as well. We have been familiarising ourselves with research on developing research literacy and talking to experts, and we are now confident in our understanding of what we need to prepare. Blueprints of learning materials and drafts will start coming out very soon.

The corpus of summaries

A third important deliverable is a corpus of teacher research outputs. This will include both written and spoken outputs, to showcase the variety of ways in which teachers share knowledge about their profession. We expect that this will help us understand the genre conventions of abstracts, presentations and more, which will in turn inform the learning materials we produce. Here, too, we have made some solid progress: the corpus of written materials is almost complete, work is ongoing in analysing spoken outputs, and we have started sharing findings in conferences.

The teacher-researcher hub

Another exciting development is that our teacher-researcher hub is almost complete. This is an online space where teachers can network, exchange ideas and expertise about ongoing knowledge production, and showcase their work. One interesting feature of the space is that it will integrate with the Open-Access Summaries in Language Studies (OASIS) database, who will provide curated lists of research for the interest groups in the hub. We already have a working website, which will appear online very soon, and we are looking forward to seeing it populated with users and events.

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Next steps

And of course, we have made plans for our next meeting, which will take place in Ankara in April 2025.

We are also thinking ahead about our dissemination and outreach events. I will be organising one in Volos in late 2025, so if you’re around and want to join us, watch this space for updates.

Last but not least, we are thinking about an edited collection that will bring together the perspectives of several renowned experts on teacher research. More about this in due time :)

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