Wrapping up the ReaLiTea project

On the 29th and 30th September 2026, we held the final Transnational Meeting of the Research Literacy of Teachers (ReaLiTea) project, this one taking place in Volos. With the project ending at the end of 2026, this was an opportunity for the team to take stock of where we are, and what remains to be done. Many of our resources are near finalisation stage, but in the post that follows, I would like to share a ‘sneak peek’ and invite any feedback you might have, while there is still time to make changes.

The ReaLiTea Community of Practice

We often tend to think of projects in terms of deliverables: pdf files or digital resources, reports and teaching materials. However, what the most successful projects produce is connections between people with similar interests. This is what we have tried to do by setting up the ReaLiTea virtual community of practice.

Built on HumHub, the community is visually similar to many social media platforms.¹ There is a central discussion space, where teachers and researchers can share insights and questions about whatever interests them, and around it you can find multiple dedicated spaces with resources on more specific topics, such as Action Research, Inclusion and Diversity, Artificial Intelligence in Language Education, and more.

We envisage the ReaLiTea virtual community of practice as a shared discourse community, where you can share articles you find interesting, pose questions and exchange ideas, find collaborators for classroom-inquiry projects and more. We are also excited about the integration with the OASIS project: the OASIS database² is creating curated collections of summaries on specific topics, and these will be cross-linked with our discussion spaces, enabling teachers to engage with the articles in the collection in ways that extend beyond passive reading.

We’d love you to take a look, and –if you find our community useful or interesting– maybe join us.

The ReaLiTea Framework

Another major contribution of the ReaLiTea project is the research literacy framework we have been developing. The framework, which builds on the collective expertise of several experts in language teacher education based in Europe, North America and Australia, maps teacher research literacy over several facets (e.g., using research, communicating research, etc.) and levels (from initial to established).

The framework has been around, in different iterations, for quite some time now, and we have already published our attempts to validate it. However, what is new is that we have now created an online tool, which is easier to use and more responsive than a pen-and-paper version.

For the time being, you can find the online self-assessment (or rather its beta version) by clicking on the link below. If you’d like to try it out, you should know that we do not store any of your data or the responses you provide. Based on our initial piloting, I am confident it works reasonably well, but if something unexpected happens as you explore, do let me know.

The ReaLiTea Self-study Materials

Our aim, in the ReaLiTea project, is to empower teachers of second, foreign and additional languages to engage with research (and in research!) more meaningfully. To achieve this, we have created multiple sets of materials for instructed learning and self-study.

For reasons of space, I will only share one set of materials, which focuses on helping teachers become more proficient in using the literature.³ This particular set of materials has been created primarily for self-study, and should be relevant to both practising teachers and students in various stages of their education.

Again, the online version of the materials is in beta, which means that there may be occasional errors (if this happens, please let us know). As above, anything you type will only live locally in your browser, and will be lost when the cache is cleared, but you do have the option of storing your responses as a Word file.⁴

The ReaLiTea User Guide

A less glamorous, but perhaps more important deliverable of the project is the User Guide for the ReaLiTea Materials, which we are now putting together. This short document should help teachers and teacher educators navigate the various materials we have produced over the last three years.

Over to you

All of the above is still work in progress, and that is precisely why I am sharing it now. With the project drawing to a close at the end of the year, the coming weeks are our last chance to act on what you tell us. So if something is unclear, missing, or simply not as useful as it could be, I would be glad to hear about it, whether in the comments below or in the community itself.

And if you do find something here that helps you in your teaching or your studies, please pass it on to a colleague. The materials will only be as valuable as the use people make of them.

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Notes

1. And, if you are close to my age, you might also recognise some of the nicer features of online forums. ↩︎
2. In case you are not familiar with their work, OASIS is a dynamic database where you can find one-page summaries of articles that appear in major journals in language and language education. The summaries are written in simple, jargon-free language and are free for everyone to access. At the time of writing (October 2026), the database contains more than 3,000 summaries. ↩︎
3. I am using the word ‘literature’ as a short-hand here to describe all forms of professional knowledge that has been made available to teachers in books, academic journals, professional manazines, blogs and podcasts. ↩︎
4. Students can also add their name to the word file and submit it as coursework, if you are using these materials in an instructed setting. ↩︎

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