Teachers who research, researchers who teach: A new issue of Kontexte

A few days before I wrote about wrapping up the ReaLiTea project, the journal Kontexte published a special issue on research-based practice for teachers of German as a foreign and second language. The title of the issue, Forschende Lehrende – Lehrende Forschende, roughly translates as ‘researcher-teachers, teacher-researchers’. The timing, of course, was a coincidence, but still a useful one.

The journal is in German, so part of my motivation for writing this post is to provide a way in for readers who cannot read the articles. All nine contributions keep returning to the questions that have occupied us in ReaLiTea: what do language teachers require for engaging with research, and what challenges they face. In the paragraphs that follow, I read across the issue with these questions in mind, and then say a few words about the individual articles. To be clear, none of the authors mentions ReaLiTea, so the connections I draw are my own.

Common Themes and Open Questions about Teacher Research Literacy

Stance, against identity

The editors of the special issue, Diana Feick, Constanze Saunders and Michael Seyfarth, introduce the collection with a distinction. Forschendes Lernen (in the strict sense) means that teachers in training go through every step of the research process. In a wider sense, which informs this collection, the term covers many forms of teacher inquiry. This raises the question: is the aim an inquiring stance, or is that stance the first step on a path that ends in the expertise of professional researchers?

Two contributions answer this question drawing on experience. Marco Triulzi and Nicole Weidinger evaluated a master’s course in Munich, in which pre-service teachers ran a complete research project and presented it at a student conference. The 22 participants rated their research competence and self-efficacy highly, but didn’t really identify as researchers. The authors, correctly, do not read this as a failure. They argue that the aim of such a programme of study, they argue, is a reflective and inquiring stance, not necessarily a research career. This reminded me of a very similar point that Juup Stelma and I report in Chapter 8 of the Intentional Dynamics of TESOL, where we describe the different outcomes of an MA module on developing researcher competence.

In her article, Giulia Radaelli arrives at the same point from the opposite direction. A literary scholar who moved into teaching German at the University of Padua, she found that her identity as a researcher sometimes got in the way of inquiring into her own practice, and that she never grew comfortable with speaking of ‘data’ and ‘indicators’.

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Description, against judgement

A second thread concerns what teachers do when they think about their teaching practice. Katja Schlatter, reporting from a certificate course in Zurich in which teachers analyse lesson videos, notes how readily their comments drift to surface features (e.g., the coloured paper a teacher handed out). Mihail Sotkov’s article shows teachers describing a lesson as teacher-centred without tying that judgement to anything in the transcript. Alexandra Gubina, writing about corpora of spoken interaction, insists that students need guidance in keeping empirical description apart from pedagogical evaluation.

All three contributions seemed to echo my own experience with post-graduate students. As I reported in Kostoulas (2024), novice teachers often tend to focus on surface features of their lessons (‘the students had fun’), and are not always ready to articulate a well-rounded evaluation of their teaching. On the whole, it seems that teachers need to master the skill of describing what happened before saying whether it was good.

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Conditions, against dispositions

The third theme is that inquiry seems to depend less on teachers’ attitudes than on what surrounds them, which seems to align well with the ecological perspective we have adopted in the ReaLiTea project.

Adelina Sîrbu’s case study of the degree programmes at Jena found that research was present in the curriculum mostly as something to read about or apply. However, most of the participants in her study (61%) reported no research experience of their own. Lisa Muik’s participatory project in Vienna was abandoned in its first round, for lack of time and of a shared research interest; however, when both conditions were in place, the same project worked. Similarly, Stephanie Mock-Haugwitz and David Stops describe participants who reach for quick solutions, and suspect that the more input trainers give, the fewer questions participants ask. Their conclusion is that inquiry needs invitation, trust, time and accompaniment. Schlatter says much the same when she describes moderation by a specialist as indispensable.

Contributions to this issue

Having made these comments, I would now like to take a more focused look at each contribution.

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Introduction to the issue

The editors’ introduction sets out the two understandings of research-based learning and organises the contributions around conceptual foundations, findings from practice and ways of fostering research-related competences. It ends by noting that it is still unclear which research competences teachers need, and what a subject-specific competence model might look like.

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Spoken corpora in teacher education

Alexandra Gubina’s article proposes that corpora of spoken learner interaction can support research-based learning, with conversation analysis as the framework. She compares three settings: classroom interaction, language tandems and learners talking to conversational AI systems. Students would develop their own questions and compare cases across settings. Gubina is candid about the costs, which include data protection and the labour of transcription.

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Research orientation in a degree programme

Adelina Sîrbu combines a student questionnaire, seven interviews with lecturers and an analysis of the module catalogues at the University of Jena, as they stood in 2023. Students tended to recognise research where it was empirical or close to practice, and most felt unprepared for an empirical thesis. Lecturers were divided on whether research supplements teacher preparation or is integral to it. Sîrbu notes that the master’s curriculum has since been revised.

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Discourse analysis as a way in

Mihail Sotkov asks which parts of functional-pragmatic discourse analysis can be adapted as a low-threshold entry into research-based learning. He proposes three steps: segmenting a transcript, grouping segments into functional sections, and paraphrasing the course of the interaction. Reconstructing deeper communicative structures is, in his view, too demanding for novices. He is clear that the proposal has yet to be tested empirically.

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Research competence and self-efficacy

Marco Triulzi and Nicole Weidinger report on the Munich course mentioned above. Before the course, students were least familiar with data analysis and analysis software. Afterwards, they rated their competence and self-efficacy highly, while researcher identity stayed neutral. The authors acknowledge that these are retrospective self-assessments from a single cohort.

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“Would you like to do some research?”

The dialogue between Stephanie Mock-Haugwitz and David Stops is the shortest text in the issue. They work in in-service training, where participants’ backgrounds vary widely, and experience of academic work cannot be assumed. Lesson observations and classroom vignettes are their examples of how an irritation can turn into a question worth investigating.

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Researcher–practitioner teams

Lisa Muik reflects on a master’s project in Vienna about using augmentative and alternative communication in teaching German as a second language. In the second round, the co-researching teacher designed feedback sheets, proposed and ran a group interview, and afterwards noticed her own leading questions. Muik concludes that teachers should share in the research question, the materials and the analysis.

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A reflexive practice report

Giulia Radaelli writes in the first person about the in-service programme Deutsch Lehren Lernen and its practice exploration projects. The project she values most analysed a course syllabus, and exposed a tension between her own teaching philosophy and the constraints of the course.

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Video-based reflection

Finally, Katja Schlatter describes how teachers at the Zurich University of Teacher Education first analyse other teachers’ lesson videos against agreed criteria, and then film and discuss their own. In 55 written reflections, teachers attended closely to corrective feedback and to their own language, but found it harder to judge whether a learning goal was appropriate.

A few closing words

After presenting the contents of the special issue, I would like to conclude with some reflections about how this connects with our work in the ReaLiTea project.

From the abstract to the particular

In their editorial, the guest editors ask what a competence model for research-based learning might look like. Our framework, with its five facets and four developmental levels, is one attempt to answer this question for language teachers more broadly. The framework, however, has been designed to be flexibly adjusted to particular contexts, and I would be curious to know how it reads from within German as a foreign and second language.

From skills development
to identity growth

Second, I note the tension between skills development and identity development as a broader process. In our work, we view research literacy growth as a process of becoming, that is, a process through which teachers approach their ideal professional image. This perspective does not align perfectly with the findings of some articles, where pre-service teachers might develop research competences without an identity restructuring. Of course, identity growth is a long-term process. Indeed, some of the work carried out on the sidelines of the ReaLiTea project, such as Raul Garcia’s identity informed research seminars for pre-service teachers, has shown that often the impact is best described as small perturbations rather than a reconfiguration of the identity system. But if one subscribes to a complexity-informed epistemology, change is the only certainty – it just happens at rates and timescales that are not always easy to observe.

From mediated to independent growth

Third, and less comfortably, I note that nearly every contribution stresses accompaniment: there is always a moderator, a trainer, a co-researcher involved. Perhaps this is just an inevitable effect of the way the collection was structured, as an exploration of research literacy development in teacher education. However, bearing in mind that much of what we have produced in ReaLiTea is designed for self-study, this issue offers a useful reminder a knowledgeable other is not easily replaced even by well-designed materials.

The issue is open access, and I recommend it, in whole or in part, to anyone who works with language teachers. More of my writing on this topic is collected on the teacher research literacy page.