Resources for Teacher Research Literacy

1. Why research literacy matters

• Empowering Language Teachers: The Research Literacy Framework (2025). Useful when you want a working definition of research literacy and a framework for developing it.
• Thinking about the teaching-research gap (2023). Useful when you want to think about why research and classroom practice so often seem to talk past each other.
• Developing research literacy skills for language teachers: The ReaLiTea project (2023). Useful when you want to understand why research literacy matters now, and how one international project set out to address it.
• The Knowledge Infrastructure Language Education Never Built (2026). Useful when you wonder why so much of what teachers learn never travels beyond the classroom, and what other professions do differently.
• Research Engagement Among Language Teachers for Refugees and Migrants in Greece (2026). Useful when you want to see how teachers in one demanding setting actually engage with research.

2. Reading research critically

Being research literate starts with knowing what to trust.

• Writing a Literature Review: Three Tasks, Not One (2026). Useful when you are reading your way into a topic and want to organise what you find.
• Becoming Research Literate: Supporting Teacher Research in ELT (2018). Useful when you want a free, book-length introduction to research literacy in ELT.
• How to spot a predatory journal (and why to avoid them!) (2018) and What do predatory journals look like? (2015). Useful when you need to judge whether a journal, and what it publishes, can be trusted.
• Can You Take the Mean of Likert Scale Data? Ordinal vs Interval Explained (2013). Useful when you want to recognise a common statistical error in published research on language education.

3. Bringing research into practice

• Making Research Work for Language Teachers (2025). Useful when you suspect you already do research-like work in your teaching, and want to see it that way.
• Writing as Theorising for Language Education (2025). Useful when you want to use reflective writing to connect classroom experience with theory.
• Inclusion beyond translation: A conversation with Maria Cioé-Peña (2026). Useful when you want to see how research on inclusive, multilingual pedagogy meets classroom decisions, and where the gap remains.

Many of the more recent posts on this page grew out of Research Literacy for Language Teachers (ReaLiTea), an Erasmus+ project that brings together seven universities across the European Education Area, and in which I lead the University of Thessaly team.

The project treats research literacy as part of reflective practice for inclusive language teaching. Among other things, it is developing ways of describing and assessing research literacy, open educational resources for student teachers and practising teachers, plain-language summaries of published research, and an online community of practice where teachers can exchange ideas.

If you would like to know more about the project, or how you or your school might take part, the links below are a good place to start.

Getting started

• Doing Classroom-Based Research (2015). Useful when you want to start exploring your own practice systematically.
• Understanding the dynamics of a language classroom (2012). Useful when you need to map the context you are studying: physical, institutional, methodological and human.
• How not to do a research project (2014). Useful when you are planning research in a school and want to avoid problems that could compromise it.
• Doing research without a control group (2013). Useful when your design cannot include a control group and you want to know whether that matters.

Observing lessons

• A classroom observation framework (2020). Useful when you are about to observe a lesson and need to decide what to look for.
• Classroom Observation for language teachers: A how-to guide (2023). Useful when you want step-by-step guidance on planning, conducting and reflecting on an observation.

Research ethics

• On obtaining consent: can information manipulation be morally justified? (2012). Useful when you are writing participant information and want to think about how framing shapes consent.
• Breaching confidentiality in research (2014). Useful when you want to understand how far your duty to protect participants extends.
• Reporting data inaccurately: why, when and how to confidentialise data? (2013). Useful when you need to disguise details to protect participants.
• Do I need permission to evaluate language teaching textbooks? (2014). Useful when your project reproduces published teaching materials.

5. Joining the conversation

• Five benefits of attending conferences (2015). Useful when you are deciding whether a conference is worth your time.
• How to present a conference paper (2014). Useful when you are preparing to share classroom research with colleagues.
• Empowering language teachers through AI and research literacies workshop (2025). Useful when you want to see what a research-literacy workshop for teachers looks like in practice.