Conducting classroom-based research is believed to be beneficial for language teachers, especially in higher education, as they have an opportunity to reflect on their own teaching practices and improve them (Hanks, 2015). In many cases, engagement in research and scholarship is also a prerequisite for language teachers to be promoted to senior positions (Smith & Walker, 2021). However, less is known about the extent to which language teachers are involved in such research, their motivations for being involved, the opportunities and challenges they encounter during the process, and how they disseminate their research efforts. Our project aims to investigate the above issues by means of a longitudinal study and by focusing on staff in the School of Languages in Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool university (XJTLU), comprised of the English Language Centre (with over 200 staff, the largest in Asia) and the Modern Languages Centre (which consists of divisions teaching Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish language modules). One unique feature of the School of Languages is the diversity of its staff, who have many varied backgrounds and nationalities. This project utilises rich data to investigate the community of staff engaged in research activities. Firstly, a workshop about engagement in research and scholarship activities was held in the school; participants' (N=36) discussions in five round tables during the workshop were audio recorded with their consent. After six months, we followed this up with interviews with individual teachers to understand their ongoing research practices and progress. Future data collection will include a follow-up questionnaire after twelve months and a reflection workshop, in which we will share some of their ideas from the first workshop and have the participants reflect on, and discuss, their ideas from a year ago. In this presentation, we will report our initial findings of teaching staffs' research activities in our local context, and highlight both opportunities and challenges for them. The opportunities include having a live research culture in the school and a wide range of support on research methods, seeking funding opportunities, and research experience sharing. The challenges were at both an institutional level and personal level, including not having sufficient time for conducting research, lack of motivation, and perceived identity as language teachers, not as researchers. We will discuss these in light of other publications on practitioner research in Chinese universities, European universities, and beyond.
References
Hanks, J. (2015). Language teachers making sense of Exploratory Practice. Language Teaching Research, 19(5), pp. 612-633. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168814567805
Smith, S. & Walker, D. (2021): Scholarship and academic capitals: the boundaried nature of education-focused career tracks, Teaching in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2021.1965570
