Earlier this year, the Foundation began offering organizations an opportunity to support both the field of language education and TIRF in a simple and affordable way. In short, TIRF invites organizations to sponsor its reference lists – an activity that also helps to promote their visibility via the Foundation’s channels.

Organizations worldwide can sponsor one (or more) of TIRF’s 240+ reference lists, which concern important areas of research in our field, for an annual fee of US $100 each. These resources are shared freely via TIRF’s website. They are extremely beneficial to researchers, writers, practitioners, teacher educators, test developers, students at all levels of higher education, and program administrators, as they contain citations that individuals can use when carrying out research, writing papers, preparing workshops or conference presentations, and so on.

Since our last update on sponsors, several more like-minded organizations have joined TIRF in its effort to provide this free scholarly resource to individuals around the world. We would like to recognize the following institutions: Anaheim University, Educational Testing Service, and the Second Language Acquisition & Teaching Program at the University of Arizona.

Sponsorship of the list(s) will remain in effect for a period of one year, after which support may be renewed. In return, the sponsoring organization’s logo will appear on TIRF’s website in three places:

  1. TIRF’s main “Reference Lists” landing page (see example);
  2. The individual reference list’s landing page (see example); and
  3. The actual reference list(s) the organization sponsors (see example).

TIRF’s ”Reference Lists” landing page consistently ranks in the top-three most visited sections of TIRF’s website (only behind the Foundation’s homepage and its Doctoral Dissertation Grants sections). Such online traffic helps to promote sponsoring organizations’ visibility via TIRF’s site.

There are two additional benefits to consider. First, every three months, TIRF will announce in its newsletter and website the latest organizations that have become involved in this program. Newly onboarded organizations’ logos will be included in such announcements. Second, organizations are encouraged to suggest additions to the list(s) they are sponsoring, or even to suggest citations for  reference lists on new topics. The types of citations that are allowed/disallowed are shared below. (Please note that TIRF reserves the right to revise items in these two categories.)

Allowable citations:

  1. Books
  2. Book chapters
  3. Journal articles
  4. Published volumes of conference proceedings
  5. Other published research reports (e.g., from ministries of education, research centers, etc.) 

Disallowed citations:

  1. Language textbooks       
  2. Unpublished doctoral/masters theses
  3. Blog posts
  4. Unpublished conference presentations

You may click here to view in Google Docs (or click here to download an Excel file) to see a list of available reference lists awaiting sponsorship. If you have any questions or are interested in sponsoring a list, please write to TIRF’s Chief Operating Officer, Ryan Damerow, at [email protected]. (Please note that sponsorship from individuals is not being accepted at this time.)

Thank you for considering supporting TIRF and the field of language education in this novel way!