Introduction

This book is concerned with the reciprocal benefits that accrue from effective collaboration between the various actors in language education – teachers and researchers but also learners and policy makers: the fruitful interdependence of policy aims and pedagogical goals and approaches on the one hand and research purposes and methodologies on the other. At the same time, challenges are addressed, not least the gulf that so often separates applied linguistic and other educational research from classroom practice (most recently, Sato and Loewen 2022) and policy-related frame factors like curricula and assessment (van den Akker 2003). There is a growing tendency to argue that we need more teaching-informed research (e.g., Rose 2019). This implies modes of collaboration between policy makers, schools, teachers and learners on the one hand and researchers on the other that are mutually beneficial, mutually respectful, mutually relevant, non-exploitative and ethically aware. Quality and validity in educational research should promote quality and validity in educational practice and vice versa, with reciprocity and ethics assumed to be intrinsic aspects of these concepts (Hammersley 2017). These considerations determined our recruitment of contributions to the book. Arranged in four sections – Addressing challenges in the classroom, Learners as collaborative agents, Collaborative research in professional development, and Collaborative research and national policy – the twelve chapters report on research in a wide variety of educational contexts in eight countries on three continents: Canada, Finland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan and Sweden. They have in common a core commitment to reciprocity and relevance and an awareness of the many ethical challenges posed by classroom research. In her afterword, Ema Ushioda reviews the twelve chapters from an ethical perspective.

The first part of the book reports on collaborative research that seeks solutions to specific pedagogical problems. Chapter 1, by Jessica Berggren, Silvia Kunitz, Malin Haglind, Amanda Hoskins, Anna Löfquist and Hanna Robertson, describes a Swedish project funded by the local school authorities and designed to stimulate spontaneous oral interaction in the language classroom. The researchers hypothesized that pupils’ reluctance to engage in reciprocal communication was due to the kind of tasks they were asked to perform. Working closely with teachers, the researchers proposed a cyclical approach – task design, implementation, analysis – that was intended to reduce the gap between theory and practice and strengthen the ecological validity of the project. Perhaps unsurprisingly, task design was found to affect pupil interaction. More importantly, too detailed instructions and too many instructional materials were obstacles to pupil interaction. The project used the techniques of conversation analysis (Sidnell 2010) to explore the nature of effective task-oriented interaction, concluding that the co-construction of reciprocal oral communication depends on pupils attending to one another’s turns-at-talk and making contributions that move the activity in question forward.

Canada’s Bilingual (partial immersion) Programs are often confronted with a problem similar to the one addressed in Chapter 1: although they develop strong listening skills in their target language, students are reluctant to speak. In Chapter 2, Katherine Mueller, Roswita Dressler, Anja Dressler Araujo, Frank Moeller and Tanya Ronellenfitsch report on the solution adopted by one German Bilingual Program in the province of Alberta: the introduction of intensive German weeks at the beginning, middle and end of the school year for Kindergarten–Grade 6 students (5–12 years old). The project adopted strategies from the Neurolinguistic Approach (Germain 2018), which emphasizes oral before written production, the modelling of full sentences, and language use for purposes of meaningful, authentic communication. For participating teachers, classroom practice was enhanced by the creation of year, unit and single lesson plans and the use of games, songs and other activities. For the researchers, language education theory was informed by the establishment of clear, grade-specific goals, consistent implementation of the Neurolinguistic Approach, and analysis of teachers’ perception of students’ success in attaining these goals.

Chapter 3, by Anna Elgemark, Alastair Henry and Petra Jansson, brings us back to Sweden, where it is officially recognized that classroom teaching is not always informed by relevant research findings. To address this problem, and to develop and test sustainable models of researcher–practitioner collaboration, the Swedish government has introduced a national system of partnerships between schools and universities. Research projects are initiated not just by academics but also by teachers, and the purpose of each school–university partnership is to develop and test a model that can support sustainable, research-based practice. The project described in Chapter 3 addresses one of the major challenges currently facing teachers of English in Sweden, namely the need to create activities that go beyond the textbook: activities which students can experience as relevant and meaningful, and which promote the development of linguistic competence. Working with primary, secondary and upper secondary teachers of English in a rural municipality, the authors – two language teacher educators and an upper secondary teacher of English – set out to enable the teachers to develop design skills that include language awareness. The chapter examines the conditions under which the collaboration took place, the challenges faced, the beneficial influences on teachers’ practice, the potential for sustainability, and opportunities to replicate the model in other contexts.

While Part I is concerned with collaboration between teachers and researchers, the three chapters in Part II explore the role of learners as collaborative agents in classroom research. Chapter 4, by Marie Källkvist, Henrik Gyllstad, Erica Sandlund and Pia Sundqvist, focuses on reciprocity and challenge in researcher–student collaborative labour in a large multilingual secondary school in Sweden. In particular, the authors explore the challenge of recruiting a sufficient number of students to provide written, informed consent and thus contribute research data. They define reciprocity in terms of the benefits that both parties need or desire from the collaboration, towards which they adopt an ethical stance (Trainor and Bouchard 2013). Their data collection followed ethnographic principles, according to which researchers build rapport with participants over time. Besides securing the research data they needed, the researchers acquired new knowledge about students’ heritage languages and the multilingual territories they had left. Students were given the opportunity to communicate with the researchers in either English or Swedish, and the data suggest that students felt empowered when positioned as experts on their multilingual repertoires and on the language ecology in their prior home territories.

In Chapter 5, Annamaria Pinter reflects on a collaborative action research project, ‘Children and teachers as co-researchers in Indian primary classrooms’, that involved two universities, one in the UK and one in India, 25 Indian teachers of English, and some 800 children from different types of school in various regions of the country. The aim of the project was to explore the concept of the agentic child, borrowed from the Childhood Studies literature, by giving children active roles in classroom action research. In particular, the project set out to discover how teachers implemented changes in their classrooms as a result of (re-)conceptualizing their learners as partners in classroom research. During the two years of the project, in addition to focussing on the children’s experiences, Pinter and her colleagues documented how the research team benefited from multiple learning opportunities that emerged organically in the process of working collaboratively. The chapter shows that by involving learners as co-researchers, the project had a transformative impact on classroom practice: teachers frequently adopted pedagogical approaches calculated to harness and further develop the agency of their learners.

Chapter 6, by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan, describes the approach that one Irish primary school has adopted to the management of extreme linguistic diversity – more than 50 home languages among 320 pupils. In keeping with the ethos of the Primary School Curriculum, the school aims to harness and extend the agency of each individual pupil by including home languages in classroom discourse. Each pupil’s home language, after all, is central to her identity and the default medium of her consciousness and discursive thinking. The chapter describes what the school’s approach looked like in 2014–2015, after an evolution of some twenty years. This description is itself the result of reciprocal collaboration between the former principal of the school (Déirdre Kirwan) and a researcher (David Little). Behind this description,...