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Masatoshi Sato, An Introduction to Evidence-Based Teaching in the English Language Classroom: Theory and Practice, ELT Journal, Volume 76, Issue 3, July 2022, Pages 412–414, https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccac023
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Evidence-based practice is an idea from medical research. The idea is rather simple: to promote an information flow whereby empirical evidence produced by researchers (i.e. laboratory experiments) is used in practice in the real world (i.e. practices in clinics). However, this information flow has been a challenge not only in medical research but in many other disciplines including engineering, social work, and clinical psychology. Educational research is no exception. Ever since the 1940s when social science research gained recognition as ‘real’ research, researchers, although perhaps not practitioners, have been concerned about the use of research in practice. As an L2 researcher, I hope that my research, and L2 research in general, influences pedagogic practices in the L2 classroom (see Sato and Loewen 2022). In reality, however, my professional expectations and career pursuits do not often align with my hope to facilitate the dialogue between researchers and practitioners. I always fall short when I try to communicate research findings with teachers, whether via teacher training, professional development workshops, talks to practitioner audiences, simplified research summaries, and publications of research articles and books. Perhaps researchers are not the best mediators of the research–practice relationship. Rather, professionals who know and deal with the real-world issues every day are better positioned to choose relevant research issues and cater research findings to practitioners.
