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Researching the Effectiveness of Professional Development in Pragmatics CONCLUSIONS

المؤلف:  Lynda Yates & Gillian Wigglesworth

المصدر:  Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education

الجزء والصفحة:  P277-C15

2026-09-04

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Researching the Effectiveness of Professional Development in Pragmatics

CONCLUSIONS

We ourselves have gained a great deal from this project. We have learned more, not only about how native speakers and non-native speakers conduct complex requests, but also about how this knowledge relates to other knowledge about language and teaching. The positive responses of teachers in both phases have encouraged us in our belief that projects of this kind can be, not only of substantive, but also of pedagogical and curricular relevance to the daily practice of teachers. This we have found motivating.

Moreover, our experiences on this project have highlighted the fact that investigating teacher responses to professional development is even more complex and more challenging than investigating teacher responses to more formal applied linguistics courses. For reasons of cost and time effectiveness, much professional development will be of the discreet, workshop variety undertaken in phase two of this project. As we have seen, it is difficult to investigate the impact of this type of activity in any depth, since contact with the teachers during and after the workshops is limited. These circumstances challenge applied linguists to find new ways of investigating the effectiveness of what they do. Ideally, in any future project of this type, our preference would be to offer a series of workshops so that the teachers can interact with the content over a longer period, and so that we are in a better position to collect their reactions. As a minimum, we will try to ensure that teachers attend at least two workshops, with the second acting and as feedback, question and further input session. Either way, our experiences on this project have persuaded us that it is worth building into our work ways of investigating the impact of what we do.