OASIS: one resource to widen the reach of research in language studies

Abstract

Language teachers report having limited direct contact with research and research findings despite generally positive perceptions of research (Borg 2009; Marsden and Kasprowicz 2017; Nassaji 2012). Key reasons teachers give are 1) practical - a lack of time and access, and 2) conceptual - academic papers can be difficult to read (Plavén-Sigray et al. 2017). In turn, researchers worry their research is not (or does not need to be) relevant to pedagogy. This paper reports on one large-scale initiative to bridge some research-pedagogy divides: Open Accessible Summaries in Language Studies (OASIS; oasis-database.org). OASIS aims to facilitate interaction between research and pedagogy, by making research into language learning, language teaching, and multilingualism physically and conceptually accessible. The freely available, one-page OASIS summaries, written in non-technical language, provide information about what the study was about, its importance, what the researcher(s) did and found. Four major international journals now require authors to write these summaries, and many others encourage their authors to write them. We discuss how and why OASIS was established, how the initiative has been received, and how summaries have contributed to professional development activities. We also and highlight some of the challenges we have encountered and discuss future directions.

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