Using the History of Language Learning and Teaching to engage the present and improve the future

This project will develop materials for use in language teacher training and Continuous Professional Development (CPD) to address a well-evidenced need for a historical perspective in language teacher training, using research in the History of Language Learning and Teaching (HoLLT) to inform language teaching practice and policy. It will draw on recent research in HoLLT generated in the AHRC-funded Research network 'Towards a History of Modern Foreign Language Teaching and Learning'. Taking five key themes of immediate relevance to teaching practice today, we will embed HoLLT in language teachers' training and CPD, responding to evidence that teachers benefit from the framework that HoLLT gives them to reflect on and critique their own and others' practice and policy. Our materials will translate research into packages tailored to the needs of practising teachers, making explicit links to their current and future roles, and they are designed to be used in training without expert input, so that they can be widely used and embedded in training.
We will incorporate an understanding of the history of language teachers' specialist discipline in training, in the way that history of medicine now informs medical training, equipping teachers to be more critically reflective in the classroom and thus more effective as teachers, as well as to be advocates for language learning and multilingualism.
Five themed training packages will be produced and made freely available, and will be distributed to our networks of initial teacher training providers and teachers. To ensure good take-up, we will launch the CPD materials with teachers and training providers at five dedicated workshops in the four nations of the UK, sponsored and publicized by our project partners, who are the main language teacher associations and CPD centres in the UK. The packages give teachers the toolkit they need to use the past in order to make decisions about their current and future practice. The five themes all tackle topical concerns in language pedagogy, providing a historical perspective on each of the key themes:
1. Differentiation and diversity in language teaching
2. What does it mean to teach culture?
3. Who's afraid of grammar and translation?
4. The target language in the classroom
5. Making the case for languages - policy and advocacy
The project is a crucial intervention in supporting teachers' training, practice and advocacy skills, at a time when language learning is in steep decline, despite the well-evidenced languages deficit in businesses, and energetic efforts to reinvigorate it at all levels (see e.g. the British Academy report Born Global 2016).

In the UK, the primary beneficiaries of our workshop materials will be trainee and practising language teachers, and those involved in their initial teacher training and Continuous Professional Development (CPD). Equipping teachers with a historical and critical framework to examine current practice and policy, we will have an impact on i. the quality of language teaching and ii. advocacy and decision making about languages, in fora where teachers and their representative bodies (amongst whom our project partners are the key organizations) have a voice. Our workshop materials will be useful to similar constituencies internationally, too, particularly in English Language Teaching, since our materials will be in English. We will make our materials available online. Some aspects of our materials - e.g. in the package on policy and advocacy - are tailored to the UK, but still raise fundamental questions of wide relevance.
Recognizing time pressures in initial teacher training, our packages are designed to be flexible and to work at any stage in teacher training / CPD, and allowing for teachers with different ranges of experience to respond in different ways. Four topics bring the past to bear on current concerns in language teaching: diversity and differentiation; teaching culture (cf. the place of literature and other cultural forms in revamped GCSE and A-levels); teaching methodology (grammar, translation, use of the target language). They give participants a wider historical framework against which to re-examine current orthodoxies (about methods, contents, relative weighting of skills, ultimate aim, etc.), so that they approach current views and practice more critically, and are more resilient when orthodoxies change during their careers. Our fifth topic, on policy and advocacy, equips participants to be advocates for language learning in their own schools and beyond, where non-STEM subjects are typically a lower priority.
The project will achieve its goal of embedding historical awareness in teacher training and CPD, yielding critically aware and reflective teachers of languages through three main mechanisms:
1. producing stand-alone materials, tailored to teaching practitioners, that can be delivered by a facilitator without special expertise in the History of Language Learning and Teaching. We expect these to be used a. in initial teacher training and in CPD for language teachers in the UK and b. (as a secondary but potentially very large audience) similar training for the very large potential audience of English language teachers in other parts of the world
2. raising awareness of the these materials by launching them nationally through the most relevant channels that will reach the widest audience of teachers (including through channels and launch events hosted by our project partners ALL, Routes Cymru, Scottish CILT, NI-CILT, as well as ISMLA);
3. making the materials freely available both through those channels, the Jiscmail list ITET-Languages (Initial Teacher Education and Training - Languages), via the international HOLLT email list, and via links from key websites, including those of our project partners, and the Resources tab on the www.hollt.net website, which is shared by other relevant national and international associations.