Research for Professional Development
Those of you who attend the IATEFL conference will know that one of the events there is a debate in which two well-known ELT figures takes sides on a controversial issue. A few years back the theme was teachers and research, and although I was not there I remember being told that some of the arguments made against the value of research for teachers were unfortunately reinforcing unhelpful clichés about the fact that one can be a perfectly competent teacher without any interest in research; I seem to recall too that another argument presented against the relevance of research for teachers was that very often those teachers who are interested in research are actually not very good in the classroom. …