What are the most effective ways to share language teaching research with practitioners and policymakers?

One of the better ways to better understand your audience and connect with them is to have them teach you. If you have deep knowledge of their organization and their position and activities within it, chat with them about your perception of what they do. Next respectfully request clarification, correction and embellishment upon what you have stated in written or oral form. Iterate as many times as necessary for you to receive affirmative non-verbal confirmation that you do have a working understanding of them.

Connecting with your audience is crucial. It's essential to consider their interests while working with them and steer clear of creating policies, reports, or curricula that don't cater to their specific needs. By gaining a deeper understanding of your audience, you can personalize your message, tone, format, and medium to match their preferences and requirements. This approach helps you communicate more effectively and achieve your objectives more efficiently.

Communicate in terms that are grounded in the experiences of your audience. Begin by asking audience ways in which language disruptions or breaches in communications have occurred in their everyday lives and professional experiences. It is important not to simply connect to the audience, but to relate to them through the tapestry of anecdotes they have experienced. Weave the technical aspects of the presentation alongside the audiences stories. Ground your work in simple and explainable terms, make the presentation a spiritual undertaking, a reaching out not only in objective ways but addressing the subjective realities and the emotional content of the participants.

I find that a good way of doing this is to organize focus groups. Team groups or social media can be fruitful, but only if participants have the time (they often don't). The idea is to make sessions and the work that comes out of them an exercise of co-production. It is important that we have a good previous knowledge of relevant policies that relate to their practice and methods that could be applied by them, and some structure we can follow, as well as flexibility to change it. I would strongly recommend to approach this with an open mind, be prepared to take in criticism, and work with empathy. We need to be able to change our own preconceptions or we risk to be useless to practitioners and perceived as entitled and out of touch.

Start by improving your question. The words effective and efficient have to always be together. One deals with what you do, and the other how you do it. When done well, they create productivity. Cheers, Bill

In my view explaining concepts and theories is secondary and depending on the stage of your work and what you are trying to achieve may be unnecessary. Whatever you need to explain, it is useful that you prepare well. You need to be synthetic and very clear. I don't think it's only about readability but also about being able to communicate conversationally (quite a different kind of language) and have a meaningful dialogue. Also about combining empathy with being persuasive and passionate about what you communicate.

Maryann DiEdwardo, a science writing and literature teacher, performs case study research on integrating metacognition and music in the classroom, drawing on her background in cognitive neuroscience and theater arts.?

Adding to what I said before, policy makers will want to know about the practical aspects of the research, while practitioners may be interested on more "performative" approaches, such as, as others suggest here, using theatre, music, or simulations of teaching practices. To policymakers, I would want to demonstrate the value and impact of the research by showing how it is of practical use to practitioners and the community as a whole. With partitioners, I would be building my finding and recommendations with them. My work has no meaning if the people is intended to serve don't feel it serves them.

I understand that this group is hard to convince because of the bottom dollar concerns they have. Therefore they need a slightly aggressive, evidence based approach.

You also want to meet people where they are. Most individuals receive all kinds of information willingly and unwillingly via social media. People are making a livable wage just by being a social media influencer. You can create a hashtag or promote to a specific audience to get the visibility you seek, and you may stumble across an unexpected audience to help push/promote your content.

In today's digital age, it's easier than ever to stay connected with our peers through various online platforms like social media, video calls, and email. While these methods are great for convenience and efficiency, they don't quite measure up to the quality of connection that comes from meeting someone in person. Meeting someone face-to-face allows you to utilize all your senses to form a deeper connection. You can pick up on body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice that you might miss through a screen. These subtle cues can provide valuable insight into a person's character, which is especially important during a first impression.

It’s important to collaborate to consider how any framework may look in individualized spaces and impact diverse students. Research findings should be malleable so that they ultimately address the needs of the students and hopefully, too, the goals of the practitioners.

Collaboration can be insightful for continued and developing research. Having an open mind to others’ ideas will only help you better your own.

Collaboration is one of the major factors when developing and designing language teaching research. Practitioners and policy makers must interface for effective implementation of joint learning strategies. Development must have some of the “co” angles, Cooperative, Collaborative and Coordinated. Together scholars and policy makers can intersect bring town and gown for teaching, learning, impact and development.

Collaboration is vital as it engages with others and share’s expertise which will inevitably compound expertise. Compounding expertise enables new insights and new ways of implementing ideas.

Provide a good concise abstract at the beginning. People are busy in their daily lives and need to sort through a deluge of information coming at them. The abstract can help direct them to the most pertinent research on the problems they are facing.

#1: Lead with why they care about what you’re going to tell them. Use metaphors that target your audience to explain complex topics. Explain your findings/topics in the most simple way possible, make sure they understand, and then move to the details. Then return to the big picture and why they care.

In my experiences authors including myself have a hard time simplifying language to make a paper concise. It's important to read and reread to be concise.

Start and end with the three take aways 3 points you think are most critical. Engage the audience in dialog with one another sometime during the meeting. Walk around if you can while talking.

Sharing language teaching research with teachers and people who make policies need to be done in a way that everyone can understand and find useful. That means talking about research without using tricky words and explaining it with real examples that teachers might see in their classrooms. Workshops or meetings where experts talk about the research findings and how they can actually help teachers teach better can be really helpful. Using the internet—like blogs, videos, or social media—is great too, so more people can learn about it. Also, making short and easy-to-read summaries that explain the important points of the research can catch the attention of policymakers and help them make better decisions for schools.