About this talk

Language teachers report having limited direct contact with research findings despite generally having positive perceptions of research. Key reasons teachers give are 1) practical – a lack of time and access, and 2) conceptual – academic papers can be difficult to read. In turn, researchers worry their research is not (or does not need to be) relevant to pedagogy. One large-scale initiative that aims to bridge some research-pedagogy divides is 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. OASIS summaries are a single page, are freely available, and are written in non-technical language. Each summary includes information about what the study was about, its importance, and what the researcher(s) did and found. In this talk, I will discuss the ideas behind OASIS, talk you through some of the decisions we’ve made and challenges we’ve encountered, and share some ideas about where the future might take us. There is time scheduled for discussion and, as all OASIS summaries are published under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence, I would love to hear your thoughts on how OASIS summaries could be adapted for different contexts.

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Dr. Inge Alferink received her PhD in Linguistics from the Radboud University Nijmegen and IMPRS for Language Sciences in the Netherlands. She now works in the UK for the OASIS initiative and the National Centre for Excellence for Language Pedagogy.

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Multiʻōlelo Webinar Series 2021 in Language Research Communication is financially supported by the UH SEED IDEAS. This webinar is hosted by the Thursday Brownbag Lecture Series, Department of Second Language Studies, UHM. We would like to express our thanks to Dr. Nicole Ziegler and Ms. Sunhee Kim Fujii for their support.