Earlier this month, TESOL International Association hosted a live online town hall to release its 2023-2027 research directions. In this piece, we share information about how TIRF supporters can learn more.
TESOL’s Research Professional Council working group led the charge in creating the new research directions. The initiative involved collecting and analyzing input from a wide range of English language teaching professionals over multiple years.
The following is an extract from the report, entitled TESOL RPC Research Priorities Survey 2022: Report on Findings, published by TESOL:
“In August 2022, a survey developed by a sub-committee of the TESOL International Association’s Research Professional Council (RPC) was launched to query people working in English language education on what they thought the research priorities should be for the field over the next five years.
The survey elicited demographic information from respondents, such as years of work, educational background, geographic region, and work setting. The survey then provided an opportunity for respondents to indicate what they thought the top three research topics, contexts, and challenges were that should be prioritized in the field of TESOL. There was also an opportunity for respondents to add anything else they would like to share on the survey. The survey was disseminated through the TESOL International Association’s social media channels and emails to the membership. The survey was further advertised on interest section discussion boards on my.tesol.org.
Graphic representation generated by the online survey tool is presented to represent the demographic data from the survey. For the qualitative responses, the data were coded and the codes gathered together into major themes related to each of the main questions on the survey. The codes were not predetermined. Rather, each response was considered on its own, and assigned a code that best captured the main point in the response. The primary code represented the overarching theme related to the question at hand. Additional codes were sometimes added to the responses to capture a more refined description of what the respondent wrote in their survey answer. The process was iterative and recursive, with codes being revisited and refined a number of times in order to identify the major themes related to the key survey questions. In addition, approximately 30% of the responses were independently coded by a second researcher. The 30% subset of independently coded data were compared with the full set of initially coded data to contribute to the validity of the identified codes and to reach a consensus on the final themes related to key research priorities, contexts, and challenges. The survey started with a total of 639 respondents. However, fewer respondents answered each of the following questions. The numbers of responses for each question are reported in the findings.”
To learn more about how TESOL’s research directions were developed, what they are, and how to use them to guide your future research, as well as to share your ideas and feedback, please click here. To watch a recording of the town hall, please click here.
