I constantlyfind students (and others!) who do“bad”/mediocre research and
seek to applyfindings as“facts”to teaching situations. Belief in the value of
research has reached silly proportions, and wisdom is often replaced by
quantities of meaningless information. This is not to say, though, that a
research-based approach to teaching is not a worthy or a possible aim.
But we have to be more critical about our research, and how we apply its
findings, by giving due consideration to the huge number of variables that
affect the teaching process, and how we gauge success therein. Direct
application of small-scale research to educational issues is often facile.Durk Gorter expresses similar views:“There is little influence because
most work is far removed from daily classroom practice and there is too
little well controlled implementation of new ideas.”Keiko Koda does not
feel that the gap between classroom and research is problematic. Her views
are clear: “Research should inform teaching. If we do classroom based
research we don’t really contribute to theory.”
Rosamond Mitchell sees some positive signs:
AL has supported the democratization/massification of language educa-
tion, providing rationales and justifications for more varied pedagogic
approaches, in particular for more meaning-based approaches (task
based learning). AL has assisted the development and evaluation of these
newer approaches to pedagogy, even if the impulse driving them came
from wider social forces (e.g. the CLIL movement). AL has also pro-
vided technical tools enabling the alignment of language education with
output-driven educational philosophies.According to Hannele Dufva there should be more attention to the link
between theory and praxis. This can be done by bringing researchers and
teachers together:
In my local community, we have aimed at strengthening the collaboration
between researchers, teacher educators, teachers, students and policy-
makers by creating a“consortium”(kielikampus.jyu.fi)–one of the aims
of which is to increase our societal impact in the area of language education.Rebecca Oxford is also of the view that such cooperation between
researchers and teachers has impact:“I have seen a few research partnerships
between university researchers and public school teachers, and in those
partnerships a great deal of sharing occurs.”
10.6 Substantial to huge impact
Paul Nation thinks:
The effect has been enormous. I attribute the effect to the amount of
publications about AL and the ever-increasing number of research-basedThe impact of AL research 129