Page 39 - ELG2001 Jan Issue 468

El•Gazette 468.qxp_El•Gazette 468 08/01/2020 15:59 Page 39

REVIEWS & RESOURCES

An oasis of data for research-

hungry language teachers

Inge Alferink tells Gill Ragsdale about the OASIS Project

Oasis was launched in 2018 to address the obstacles How can authors get
teachers face in using research. How does it work? involved
Oasis-database.org is a publicly-accessible source of summaries of Anyone can send in a summary of
research articles in the fields of language learning, language teaching, their work if it is published in an OASIS is a much-needed
and multilingualism. It summarises articles in a single page with minimal SSCI (Social Sciences Citation resource in the research data
jargon, and includes information about what a study was about, why it Index) listed journal. OASIS does desert
is important, and what the it found. not review the quality of the
Our aim is for parents, teachers, teacher educators, policy makers, research, so it is important that it
and other interested people outside of academia to have access to only accepts content from peer-reviewed journals. It is not a perfect
research findings. process and some poor research still gets published – but it’s the best
quality control available for published research at present.
The idea came from teachers?
Teachers are telling us they want research but they don’t have access or And the response?
they don’t have time. Conversely, researchers worry that their research We have over 1300 users and feedback has been very positive so far. We
doesn’t get to the people beyond their immediate colleagues. So, it’s a also have support from organisations such as the Association for
two-way thing – a bridge. Language Learning (ALL).
We have been using these summaries with school teachers. In the
Where do you get the summaries? Netherlands, there is a group who are using this for the basis of their
We currently have three journals – Language Learning, The Modern monthly staff discussion.
Language Journal and TESOL Quarterly – who have agreed to ask all We are on twitter and whenever there is a new summary it is tweeted
their authors to submit summaries of their articles. Eventually, the aim out with a reference and link to the original paper. We also run a
is for all the relevant journals and authors to become involved. monthly newsletter.
As authors write their own commentaries, this is quite different to
reading a blog or news report, which may interpret or edit the original n Inge Alferink is a post-doctoral researcher on language pedagogy at
article. York University and co-ordinator for the project.

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