Yoshiyuki Nakata

The development of research agendas is a crucial component of the process of reclaiming teaching as a site of knowledge production in language education research. However, in the TESOL field, the research agenda (RA) has traditionally been defined in relation to a gap between research and practice. Researchers often justify their work by highlighting significant disciplinary knowledge gaps. Therefore, when developing an RA, we must ask ourselves: (1) Whose interests does the RA serve? (2) Who should be involved in setting the RA? And (3) how can the RA be created and promoted? Engaging proactively with these questions encourages collaboration with practitioners and strengthens the link between research and practice. This approach helps us establish inclusive research agendas that benefit knowledge producers, including teachers, students, policymakers, and researchers. An RA should emerge from a collaborative and consultative process involving both researchers and teachers as practice researchers. Collaborative RA development involves several steps: (1) understanding the needs of the educational context; (2) formulating a preliminary research design and questions that incorporate practitioners' perspectives; (3) conducting a literature review to help researchers and teachers as knowledge producers understand the research's significance; (4) selecting methods aligning with the research design and questions, ensuring consistency with the RA; (5) providing readers with detailed information about the RA to offer context; and (6) publishing in a medium and forum aligned with the RA. This article discusses these steps in detail, outlines strategies for their implementation, illustrating the collaborative process for developing research agendas in TESOL. From a practical perspective, this paper argues for the agentic involvement of both researchers and practitioners in developing RAs, highlighting the connections between their roles in the research process and raising researchers' awareness of research practices that foster a virtuous circle between research and practice.

This study presents case studies of three early‐career secondary TESOL teachers in Japan, focusing on their professional development experiences. Their narratives were collected in two phases: (1) reflective reports submitted by the teachers during the fourth year of their teacher training, which included reflections on their previous L2 learning experiences, influential teachers, and insights from their practicum experiences and (2) a focus‐group discussion with a member of the research team with teaching experience, concentrating on the gap between the participants' expectations and the realities of the struggles and challenges they encountered early in their teaching careers, as well as their visions of their ideal future selves as educators. Data analysis revealed that (1) formative learning experiences in primary and secondary school strongly correlated with sustained commitment to teaching; (2) having experienced teachers as mentors with whom they could discuss both educational and personal concerns significantly impacted their professional development; and (3) university studies and study‐abroad experiences shaped their development as both learners and teachers. These findings underscore the importance of fostering supportive networks for early‐career teachers and facilitating opportunities for sharing and critical reflection in professional development.

The key to successful language learning depends on the extent to which learners are self-regulated in learning a second or foreign language (L2). In this process, learners’ perceptions and beliefs about their abilities play a crucial role in predicting or controlling positive or negative emotions, motivation and the use of strategies. Therefore, it is vital to clarify the role that learners’ perceived abilities play in self-regulated language learning. The present paper aims to: (1) provide a review of empirical studies related to L2 strategy use, motivation, and social regulation about ability beliefs, (2) explore the reciprocal relationship between these constructs, and (3) suggest future research directions that will help promote self-regulated language learning research. By doing so, we aim to contribute to the broadening of L2 proficiency research, provide a more comprehensive understanding of the second language acquisition process, and ultimately support language teachers in understanding the developmental processes of L2 learners.

This article reports on a study that explored Japanese university students’ evolving motivational regulation by mapping its changes over one year of their studies in a collaborative project-based learning environment. An autonomy-supportive collaborative intervention was delivered to the 19 participants with varying or no experience of communicative language teaching and study abroad. Our cluster-based analysis of multiple questionnaire responses revealed increased motivation among the participants. Three learners were selected to represent each clustering group based on the unique characteristics of their motivational trajectories over the year, which reflect the mediating impacts of their previous language learning experiences and their learning experience during the pedagogical intervention. The findings indicate that language teachers can enhance learners’ ‘motivational regulation’ by creating a supportive learning environment in the classroom.

Given the difficult and unforeseen circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to transition from face-to-face instruction to digital instruction. This paper provides a teacher educator’s autoethnographic account of implementing the pedagogical intervention of digital learning and student teachers’ reactions to its effects on their motivation and well-being. More precisely, it attempts to explore (1) student teachers’ perceptions of the effect of digital learning on their motivation and well-being in teacher education, (2) their understanding of active learning, (3) their preferred format of teacher training courses both in normal and emergent circumstances, and (4) the instructor’s perceived efficacy of digital learning on teacher education courses. The participants were one instructor (the author) and nine third-year university students taking an English Language Teaching Methodology course, which is a requirement for obtaining a license to teach English at secondary schools in Japan. I conducted a closed and open-ended questionnaire as well as a follow-up questionnaire survey and the instructor’s observation. The findings confirmed the benefits of online lessons on student teachers’ motivation and their sense of well-being (physical and psychological), suggesting the necessity of carefully selecting the instruction format that meets course objectives.

This article reports on a case study of Miho, a Japanese high school teacher, exploring her efforts to bridge research and practice in her use of motivational strategies. Drawing on Emirbayer and Mische’s conceptualisation of agency and Connelly and Clandinin’s theorisation on teachers’ personal knowledge, the study examined how this language teacher-researcher developed her agency as she strove to integrate motivation strategy research into teaching practice. The narratives of Miho’s experience were gathered over three phases: (1) an enrolment phase; (2) a retrospective phase/the follow-up retrospective phase; and (3) an overview phase. The analysis of the collected data focused on Miho’s experience of becoming an agent of using motivational strategies. The findings suggest that the more experience she accumulated through trial-and-error use of motivational strategies in different educational contexts, the better she became at absorbing what she had learned from her research engagement, and the better she found herself able to make full use of strategies learnt in the classroom.

The present paper aims to explore how a certain class mode emerges in the context of collaborative learning, which affects student motivation and learning. Multiple sources of data were collected from 51 high school students in three different classes (named A, B and C) where the same teacher gave them the same lesson content throughout a full year. A quantitative analysis of multiple questionnaire responses revealed that patterns of motivational change and change in perception of pair and group work were markedly different in the three classrooms. A qualitative data analysis of interviews and observations of pair and group activities showed that different classroom modes of regulation are likely to emerge even among homogenous classes consisting of students with the same L1 and similar proficiency levels under the same curriculum. The findings imply that socially-shared regulation among students is one of the keys to creating a positive classroom environment in which students influence and motivate each other.