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

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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).