Welcome to the May/June edition of TLT Interviews! For this issue, we have a double header for you—two insightful interviews. The first is with Dr. Jim McKinley, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and associate professor of applied linguistics and TESOL at UCL Institute of Education, University of London. Dr. McKinley has taught in higher education in the UK, Japan, Australia, and Uganda, as well as schools in the US. His research focuses on the intersection of applied linguistics and the internationalization of higher education, targeting implications of globalization for second language (academic and scholarly) writing, English-medium instruction, and the teaching-research nexus in higher education. Dr. McKinley has published in many leading journals in applied linguistics and higher education, and he is an editor and author of several books on research methods in applied linguistics. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Education in the University of Oxford, the current co-editor-in-chief of the journal System, and co-editor of the Language Teaching entry in the Cambridge Elements series (published by Cambridge University Press). Dr. McKinley was interviewed by Dr. Shuji Kojima, an English teacher in Kwansei Gakuin High School. Dr. Kojima has an M.A. in TESOL from the University of Melbourne and a Ph.D. from Temple University. His current research interests include professional development for English teachers, teacher education/training, and genre-based instruction. So, without further ado, to our first interview!
Shuji Kojima: Thank you so much for spending some time with me today. I’m glad that I could hear a lot about the current trend of a teaching and research nexus from you and deliver it to the readers of TLT. First and foremost, would be this question: “May I ask for your credentials, please?” This question is directly referred to from your latest article in the Modern Language Journal (Rose & McKinley, 2022). How do you describe yourself as an educator?
Jim McKinley: This is such a good question because it’s about the identity that we form, but it’s also about the identity that we claim to have or to use and descriptions of ourselves. For me, I am a language teaching researcher, for sure. I am no longer a language teacher. And that divide, I think, is the part that has worried me the most because I suppose I was always interested in the teaching. I think that was the part that interested me the most. I don’t have any teaching certifications that say: “Jim has learned these methodologies and has applied them in this way.” I often had people visiting the campus to see my classes because I was one of the few people who was always willing to share, but none of that was ever a part of a formal evaluation system or certification or anything. I was teaching a little bit, not language teaching, but I was teaching in a junior high school in the United States before I left for Japan. I knew about classrooms and classroom management and the language teaching that I was doing, but I wanted to be perfectly honest. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was having a good time. Students seemed to have a good time. They did comment quite a lot on this point that I made them comfortable about making mistakes, and I did regularly enforce their interest in learning from mistakes. I knew that there was this whole area that I wanted to investigate further. When I did my master’s, I was able to do some of that. And then, the first book that I edited focused on learning from the messiness of doing research, in that case, applied linguistics research, but it’s all related to that point. I wasn’t going to do a Ph.D. right away. So, I finished my master’s, and I stayed on teaching at the University of Sydney. But it was actually in that teaching process and working with other people in the university that I realized: “Okay, now, what’s the next step?” If I’m going to answer these next questions, I need this next level. And so that’s how that all went. I have a fairly standard researcher trajectory as far as credentials go. It wasn’t until I got to the UK that I did a Higher Education Academy senior fellowship certification. I had to provide reflective case studies, and I had to have some letters of reference to support so there’s that kind of credential for teaching at university in that way. And then that’s it, nothing beyond that. All of my degrees are in applied linguistics; none of them are in education. And I teach these students, so I do feel a little bit like a fraud.
In your plenary speech and your recent articles (McKinley, 2019, 2022a; McKinley et al., 2021), you have discussed the divide between the language teaching researchers and the language teaching practitioners, could you explain the current situation regarding that topic?
I think the biggest issue for that divide is language teachers don’t have the encouragement to publish. There aren’t support structures in place to publish, and there isn’t enough emphasis on the value of even using published research. I think one of the things I mentioned in the plenary was getting these ideas from the research where people have discovered that language teachers aren’t accessing the research in these journals. I think this is a point that probably language teachers need to be guided toward. There needs to be some form of professional development that helps to support engagement with that research. From there, we then might see more language teaching publications. I think the other really big problem is, for somebody like me, I wanted those research things, so I was doing that in my own time. I mean, the Ph.D. was in my own time, right? This is something we decided to do. And all with my own money, my own energy, this was a goal that I had—but that was a personal, individual goal to achieve that. The publishing that came with it was more around having the opportunity, having engaged with research at that level, doing the master’s and Ph.D. I then could say: “Okay, I can contribute to these discussions, ongoing academic discussions in this way, by publishing my own research.” But without that experience, I don’t see that happening. Even when I finished my master’s, I wasn’t publishing for my master’s. I was a language teacher, and I had a master’s to understand it. And I thought that was fine. But engaging in a Ph.D., I thought there was this other world of academic discussion, and that happens, but it’s separated. That’s the problem, right? Being involved in that and engaging in that in a space that engages with scholarly publications regularly, completely separates me from the language teaching. Yeah, that’s a problem.
Is the divide growing or do you think it has just always been this way?
This is a really good question because I know they’ve been talking about this divide for a really long time. I do believe that it may not necessarily be getting bigger, but I think it’s becoming more ingrained. I think it’s becoming potentially more difficult to bring them back together. I think that it’s because of some of the structures in place. The incentives like promotion pathways, and just our culture—the ways that we engage with this. The language teachers just don’t engage with research like that and aren’t expected to and aren’t given any time or space or support to do it. So, it’s left to those in the area where research does happen, which is you and me!
How would it be possible for both researchers and practitioners to work together for learners and students? Sato and Loewen (2022) posed the following four categories: (a) collaborative mindset, (b) the nature of research, (c) venues for dialogue, and (d) institutional support? I would like to hear your comments about these four categories.
Based on my perspective on all of that, I appreciate all of it. I think it is definitely headed in the right direction. It addresses that solidifying of the bifurcation. So, I think in that way, we see them as two separate parts, but those efforts that they’re talking about are sewing them together. The thing for me is, ideally, I would actually like to see these two things grow together. So, I do think it is like a wound. This cut down the middle into two sides and stitching it together with these kinds of initiatives can help them ultimately come together. I think this is the development that I want to see. I like these initiatives, I think collaboration between language instructors and content instructors, for example, the professional development efforts—all of this is really good, but I want to see it have a clear objective of creating holistic individuals. I think that is the part of the discussion that seems to fall a bit short. However, I recognize that within an institution or program, having every individual in that program to be a balanced holistic academic, is just kind of unrealistic. By using the full collection of faculty members to balance that out does make more sense, I get that. But even if these initiatives—these kinds of stitching initiatives to create this objective of a healed, reunification of a holistic academic—if that’s there, some kind of goal, I think it would help if there is recognition of such initiatives. But I’d kind of put that out there just as a way of thinking about it because I suppose practically speaking, it feels a bit unrealistic.
Who else could take the initiative to solve the big problem?
I think it is interesting to me how whenever I speak with Masatoshi Sato and Shawn Loewen, or with Heath Rose, I think we recognize that we’re really only coming at this problem from the same perspective. These are people who understand where the debate comes from and understand that it’s a series of reasons for the divide. It’s not just one thing, but we’re all in kind of full agreement about that. I think that’s not going to help us to get there. We can raise awareness about the discussion and get people to think about it from these different perspectives. But, we need people coming from more diverse contexts and different experiences to help to clarify what it means to work towards supporting a nexus because there are plenty of people who will say: “What’s the point?” Honestly, in the study that we did, we had such opinions. In the open-ended comments in the survey, the authors, almost unanimously, were saying these things are separate. But these are all people engaging with research at that level, right? So, it’s only those journals. We probably really should do the study again in other journals, like The Language Teacher, and look at some of these other journals to see what about the journals where there are practitioners publishing their work. I know they’re kind of hard to find, but would they be something different if we did a survey with those authors? That’s the perspective I think that we’re missing. We’re focused far too much on the highest impact factor journals and the authors with the research credentials to tell us and that’s relying on the research to follow. I would want to see now some more raising of value of people’s opinions and ideas about this coming from more of a kind of practitioner-based context.
Now I’d like to ask some questions about language teacher identity. In your article Rose and McKinley (2022), you explored language teachers’ and researchers’ identities. Could you briefly explain the research question and the findings?
The research question was based on our own thoughts reading about author bios. Hyland and Tse, I think it was 2012, we used their analysis of the bio genre to inform our understanding of what a bio is, and how an identity gets constructed in a bio, to look for where in the language-teaching research do language teaching researchers talk about themselves or identify themselves as teachers. Just based on our own bios, and looking at just a few others, we realized we hadn’t mentioned all of our teaching experience, and we have a lot of it. Then looking at others, we think we assume that they are teachers because the way that they write about this, and then I also thought about the kind of work that’s being published. I feel like my language teaching research based on language teaching itself, that data, that was in the past. I don’t have any more of that. I think the last of it really came out of my Ph.D. research. I did some other small things based on a bit of the last data that I collected before I left Japan, but since then, I’ve been writing about all this other stuff. So, does that change my bio or do I change my identity as a teacher because I am no longer a language teacher? It doesn’t seem right. The history is important. So, I do try to explain that I did teach in US schools, and I taught in Australia and Japan, and I even added Uganda because I was there for one semester. It shows that there’s a diversity of places. I was teaching ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages) in these places, but then I’m teaching in higher education in these places. I try to get all of that in there just to paint a picture so that people understand who I am as an educator and my identities as an educator. That’s the big thing that we looked for in that study. And in the one space where we knew we should be able to find it and then often find it.
I was fascinated by your homepage (McKinley, 2022b). I want to introduce your homepage to the readers of this journal. Is that one ideal way to show the nexus of research and teaching to the people in the TESOL field?
Thank you. I’m glad because you got it. I thought, “How I could possibly have somewhere that I could refer to so that people could kind of get a more comprehensive idea of my background and who I am and the directions that I go in my own educational philosophy?” It’s my space that I control so I can put those things in there. I think because that’s all part of who I am, and that’s what I want to portray to make sure that it’s kind of a comprehensive space. But can I say a couple of things? One is I’m a little bit horrified in my efforts to become a holistic academic that my research and teaching are separated categories as well as the roles! So, there’s the management of that. It is unbundled and completely separated. I don’t know, I need to figure that out. The other thing is I’ve always meant to, and I can’t believe I never did it—because now I’d have to kind of go back and try to make up for it—keep a CV of failures that people can see because that website is a website of achievements. Look at all these presentations and publications. Isn’t this great all these successes? Nowhere in there is any like, “What about the applications for funding and the papers that were rejected? The jobs that I went for but didn’t get.” There’s none of that information in there. I really wanted to do that, to create a CV of failures, to say these are the things I grew from. I do still intend to do that at some point. I’m just a little bit nervous. I think there’s a sense to where, and I’ve heard this with people about a CV of failures, that you kind of don’t do it until you get to where you need to be. And then it’s okay. But I should still do it.
What you have discussed about the nexus between practitioners and researchers is mainly targeting higher education levels. Could you tell us your insights and opinions about a teaching-research nexus at the middle school level?
I’m really glad you asked that because I do focus mainly on higher education because I’m looking at a number of elements in terms of contractual things. The contracts that have been in higher education are so different from the teacher contracts in secondary or middle school education. For high school, I think more and more we’re seeing professional development opportunities for people to engage with research to an extent or at least kind of having a certain appreciation for it. Middle school and primary school seem to be, for whatever reason, somewhat neglected. I think probably the biggest problem there is it is impossible given the structures in place in a middle school; for example, for people to engage in the kind of research that gets involved with learners in that age group. So, you’re going to teach young learners English and all these different areas, early education, that we don’t see in the journals, right, those researchers are so removed from the schools, yet they visit the schools, they spend time with the schools, and have relationships with the schools. That’s where there’s a really big divide that happens. But there I think are opportunities because those researchers are visiting the schools, and they are talking to the teachers, and they are collecting data in classrooms where they are getting that stuff, but they need to be doing it in collaboration with the teachers. So, until the schools at that level—because I think in high school they do know—there’s recognition of the benefits of that kind of collaboration between teachers and researchers. It’s in the middle school that it needs to be brought in there as well because that’s a whole different area of research that isn’t being touched enough. I mean it is in some places, but whether or not the teachers are just providing the data or actually engaging as teacher-researchers are two very different things.
Could you give the readers who want to find a meaningful teaching-research nexus some possible and prospective research themes or topics?
This is probably the way I should have concluded the TESOL Quarterly paper, with some kind of concrete recommendation. This is the kind of thing where people engaged solely in research miss out. I suppose there are kinds of themes that would be worth pursuing that might help to capture the nexus a bit more. I always think about exploratory practice. Action research and case studies, in particular, are research designs that are effective. The themes that would fit with those are definitely problem-based. I suppose that there’d be good opportunities because they’re so structured, and they’re also negotiated between teachers and students. And all of that is informed by practice, which is great. It’s problem-based practice-informed research. So, task-based and problem-based projects that can be conducted through case study or action research designs would best achieve the thing closest to a nexus, I think, and then certainly the appreciation for it.
Now, you mentioned action research and research design. Your book, The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods, Applied Linguistics (McKinley & Rose, 2019) carefully describes how research should be implemented. What should novice language teacher researchers read and learn when implementing research?
The introduction chapter to that book would be a fantastic start! Because we do actually talk about doing case studies and doing action research and what’s involved with those in a very introductory way. But in terms of what could be learned about, that kind of systematic approach as far as collecting data, is the important part. Because I think the idea of teachers thinking problem-based—trying some things out and seeing how they go—that’s pretty natural, and it makes sense as a teacher. They don’t think of that as research. This is just a process that they go through and maybe even by the end of the lesson, they found some kind of solution that works. But where there are ways of understanding, appreciating the research, are these more structured ways I think that’s being able to learn something about some of the more systematic approaches to that kind of problem-solution effort that teachers make, by thinking about how to set up a research project to respond to a particular problem rather than just trying to address it as you go. You’re actually setting up a project for the class. It’s the best thing they could do, and they don’t need to be big. I think when you look at the published research, these enormous, these three, four year-long studies with six classes and four teachers, and it’s all this stuff—and I’m guilty of it myself—I thought I could use one of my own studies as an example, and I looked at it and thought: This is inaccessible. I think this is the thing that can be off-putting for teachers for accessing that stuff. And being able to focus on just a single case study in their own class, for example, or an action researcher recognizing that, okay, here’s a problem. I have an intervention I can come up with, let me understand how action research works to introduce this intervention so that I have an understanding of what these students are experiencing before the intervention and after and can go from there because that’s the part that often gets missed. I think teachers, they think of this intervention, they introduce it, and then they have outcomes of it, but they never collected any data before. So, it doesn’t end up working, and it’s not published. I think that’s the kind of thing if they have a better, clearer idea of how a systematic approach to doing the things that they would normally regularly do and turn it into an actual project that doesn’t have to be big. It can be really very small. It still needs to be rigorous; then it would work.
I want you to give the readers some comments or encouragement, who would like to pursue teaching-research nexus.
Definitely. Don’t be intimidated by the size of the studies that you see out there. Certainly, decades ago, people did have much more focused single case studies that provided such big contributions to understanding. That’s the point. I think, maybe don’t focus on having a research project that the objective is a solution. Have a research project where the objective is to develop an understanding. I think that’s an important distinction. If we can recognize that developing an understanding of it has achieved the outcome, it’s a much more rewarding experience doing that research. Otherwise, you feel like I’ve gone through this whole process, but I made some mistakes along the way. So, the solution doesn’t work. Don’t worry about that. All those mistakes you made along the way you learn from. As you have developed an understanding by doing that, maybe the next time you do that research project, right, you’ll change it. But for me, I think this is the thing about then disseminating these things and sharing them, and I hope that people will contribute to journals like The Language Teacher about some of these experiences. If it went wrong, that’s even more reason to share. Tell us what went wrong. Why did it go wrong in this way? If it was, “I just didn’t understand how research works,” then say that and think about what that means. No, people may not necessarily want to publish that. But it’s still an important experience for you to do that and submit it to a journal. You’ll get potentially hopefully some feedback on that to say this is an incomplete study or this doesn’t do this. If the study is going to be how you learn from your mistakes, please clarify that right from the beginning. It’s about this kind of consistency of reporting, rather than worrying too much about the structures in place and in the research that you might conduct in your own classroom. At the same time, you’re getting some basics about actually researching conducting case studies.
Thank you very much. Dr. McKinley for taking the time to provide your insights about teaching-researching nexus for TLT readers.
References
Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (2012). ‘She has received many honours’: Identity construction in article bio statements. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 11(2), 155-165. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2012.01.001
McKinley, J. (2019). Evolving the TESOL teaching-research nexus. TESOL Quarterly, 53(3), 875–884. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.509
McKinley, J. (2022a). Supporting the teaching-research nexus: From practice to research and back. The Language Teacher, 46(5), 5–9. https://jalt-publications.org/articles/27457-jalt2022-plenary-speaker-supporting-teaching-research-nexus-practice-research-and
McKinley, J. (2022b, November 11). Jim McKinley. https://www.jimmckinley.me
McKinley, J., McIntosh, S., Milligan, L., & Mikołajewska, A. (2021). Eyes on the enterprise: Problematising the concept of a teaching-research nexus in UK higher education. Higher education, 81(5), 1023–1041. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00595-2
McKinley, J., & Rose, H. (Eds.). (2019). The Routledge handbook of research methods in applied linguistics. Routledge.
Rose, H., & McKinley, J. (2022). May I see your credentials, please? Displays of pedagogical expertise by language teaching researchers. The Modern Language Journal, 106(3), 528–546. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12794
Sato, M., & Loewen, S. (2022). The research–practice dialogue in second language learning and teaching: Past, present, and future. The Modern Language Journal, 106(3), 509-527.