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Language Learning in Higher Education

Journal of the European Confederation of Language Centres in Higher Education (CercleS)

Editor-in-Chief: Szczuka-Dorna, Liliana / O’Rourke, Breffni

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2191-6128
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Language centre teachers as researchers: The case of Finland

Heidi Rontu / Ulla-Kristiina Tuomi
Published Online: 2015-10-02 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/cercles-2015-0022

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Abstract

Language centres in higher education are facing new challenges as they plan curricula for an increasingly diverse student body and undertake new tasks in support of the multiform internationalisation of universities. Continuing professional development clearly needs to be taken to a new level, and one way of doing this is to include research in a more systematic way. In this article, we focus on the role of research as an aspect of the development of a language centre and on human resources development in particular. Based on recent data from university language centres in Finland, we report language centre personnel’s views on research in relation to their work. The results show that they are strongly in favour of developing their professional practice by engaging in research and that they feel that research conducted in language centres should be practical and have a direct relation to the other work of language centres. We also discuss different ways of supporting a research orientation and present practical models for implementing this in the development of work.

Keywords: language centre; teacher research; human resources development; professional expertise

References

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About the article

Heidi Rontu

Heidi Rontu has been Director of the Aalto University Language Centre since 2006. In 2004–2005 she was a lecturer and deputy director at the Language Centre of the Helsinki University of Technology, and in 2005–2006 professor in Swedish at the University of Helsinki. Her areas of research include early bilingual development, pragmatics of codeswitching, text linguistics and multisemiotics.

Ulla-Kristiina Tuomi

Ulla-Kristiina Tuomi was Director of the University of Tampere Language Centre from 1997 to 2007 and has been Director of the University of Helsinki Language Centre since 2007. Her interests include language education policy, leadership and management issues, HR development, quality assurance and international cooperation.

Published Online: 2015-10-02

Published in Print: 2015-10-01

Citation Information: Language Learning in Higher Education, Volume 5, Issue 2, Pages 465–480, ISSN (Online) 2191-6128, ISSN (Print) 2191-611X, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/cercles-2015-0022.

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