Dr Claire Dembry from our ELT Research Team travelled to Lancaster University to share our experiences of working with linguists and other academics at the ESRC funded event “Collaborations between linguistics and the professions”. Here she tells us about some successes and challenges of collaboration and what the future might hold for ELT Research at Cambridge.
Collaboration with linguists and ELT experts forms the basis of so much of the work the ELT Research Team at Cambridge does, so I was thrilled to be invited to Lancaster to talk about our experiences. In Cambridge we publish learning materials that support teachers and learners of English all over the world – from pre-primary learners in kindergartens through to self-study adult learners accessing study materials via their phones. All of these learners have very different needs, challenges and goals. While all members of our Research Team have an ELT and/or linguistics background, there are only seven of us – we can’t be world-leading experts in the vast range of research areas that we integrate into our learning content. Instead, we form partnerships and work together with academics who are at the forefront of current thinking. We are constantly managing a wide variety of projects: huge multi-year undertakings with benefits that reach across a whole range of our learning materials, right down to very small one-off consultancy work around a narrow question or topic of interest.
What makes collaboration successful?
- Shared interests and goals. By far the most important factor in working together with academics is genuinely having mutual interests, and a shared desire to problem solve and improve educational outcomes for our teachers and learners.
- Clarity of expectations. All of the experts we work with want to get academic research into an applied context, and to make a difference to teachers and learners. Often the most difficult thing is agreeing the scale of a project, responsibilities of everyone involved and the timelines.
- Flexibility – on both sides, because things change!
What makes collaboration difficult?
- Timescales. Projects and consultancy in academia are often a longer process than they are for us in materials development, and so being clear about what is needed and when, is really important. We usually can’t spend 3 years working on a project, unless the findings can be widely applied.
- Audience. Academics are often used to talking to other experts about their research, who are familiar with terminology and the research context, whereas our Research Team’s audience is typically our teams of publishers, editors and authors working on learning materials. This can result in differences in communication style that we need to address to make sure we can implement research effectively.
- Processes. Contractual and legal issues are obviously important, but they can be a time consuming and frustrating process!
We’ve found that these difficulties are rarely insurmountable though, and we can make research partnerships work by being open, honest and flexible in our approach.
Success stories
A few years ago, in partnership with the Centre for Approaches to Social Sciences (CASS) at Lancaster University, we collected and transcribed 11.5m words of contemporary spoken British English, and made this resource freely available for the research community to use – the Spoken BNC 2014. This was a truly equal partnership with respect to the time, effort, resource and the collaboration that was involved to make this work. Working together on this project fostered a great relationship with the Linguistics and English Language Department in Lancaster, and we’ve continued to work together on a range of projects since then, covering topics such as specific learning difficulties, vocabulary development, and grammar and cognition.
In a similar way, we’re also currently working on projects with:
- The Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge relating to the role of play in early learning, EMI and learner corpora.
- The School of Education at the University of Leeds about the language used in primary and secondary classrooms.
- The School of English at the University of Nottingham on motivation, and on digital and online learning.
We hope to share more details on these soon. Along with these more institutional partnerships, we work with a wide range of experts from various universities around the world. Often this is to get their expertise in answering questions we have about aspects of ELT, and to translate their work into Research Guides and White Papers that can be used to shape and change our approach to learning. Our publishing teams have a huge number of questions about all manner of ELT topics, and these guides provide a jargon-free, easy to understand summary of current research in a particular area that can then be implemented in our courses – have a look at our freely available White Papers here.
What’s next?
It’s certain that collaboration with linguists and specialists in the area of ELT research is hugely important for ELT at Cambridge University Press, and it’s something we’ll continue to actively pursue in order to best support our in-house teams, our authors and ultimately our teachers and learners. We’re already working on lots of new projects: critical thinking for EAP; digital pedagogy; technology in the classroom; spoken English; and integrating life skills in the ELT classroom. Look out for more information about these soon. If you have suggestions about how Cambridge ELT and experts can work together in the future, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
Read more about how we have used our research to create a Cambridge Framework for Life Competencies which helps teachers understand life skills or competencies better.