What is this project about?

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Educational inequalities are one of our global challenges (cf. ‘quality education’ in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Agenda), and they must be tackled to ensure societal development.  Both the UK and Italy face its own educational challenges.  For example, the UK is well-known for its issues in first/additional language education; and Italy has one of the lowest English language proficiency indexes within Europe according to the 2021 English First English Proficiency Index.  Most recently, educational challenges have been worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced schools to shut down and deliver their classes remotely.

 

Our proposed collaboration aims to research the use of technology as a way of reducing educational inequalities in the UK and Italy.  More specifically, this project focuses on the introduction of corpus linguistics (CL) to future primary-school teachers in both countries.  A corpus is a principled textual collection; and CL is a computerized way of investigating these texts. Although CL has revolutionized the way we describe, theorize and study languages, there is a paucity of empirical studies on the use of CL to reduce educational inequalities in primary schools. In the UK, one of the few exceptions relates to an ESRC-funded project in England that required pupils to use a program designed for adults (Sealey, Thompson & Scott, 2004).

 

The proposed collaboration will entail the organization of two workshops for future teachers in the UK and in Italy.  These workshops will have a three-fold function:

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1. they will be a means to collect data about the pedagogical integration of technology in future teachers’ practices through pre-/post-workshop questionnaires and post-workshop interviews;

2. they will ensure the engagement of non-academic stakeholders from the inception of our planned collaboration, allowing us to develop a research agenda which is informed by their needs; and

3. they will allow us to undertake ethical research by giving something back to the local non-academic communities involved in the project.

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What is the potential impact?

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The project team holds the view that (i) impact should underpin every step of our interdisciplinary collaboration and (ii) academic and non-academic stakeholders need to be involved in the project to ensure long-term impact.  Guided by these two principles, our collaboration will have the following impact.

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• Academic impact

  • Further the links among the applicants, who bring a wealth of different expertise to the project (Jogie: technological inequalities; Macaluso: economic inequalities; Pagani: inequalities in education; Viana: language-related inequalities).

  • Contribute to the exiting literature on the intersection of language, technology and teacher education.

  • Explore avenues for institutional collaboration amongst the Universities of Bologna, East Anglia, Milano-Bicocca and Roehampton, which has been underexplored to present.

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• Non-academic impact

  • Engagement with non-academic stakeholders – namely, future language teachers in the UK and Italy – from the project outset.

  • Educate future teachers on the pedagogical use of technology and raise their awareness of how technology may be used to reduce educational inequalities.

  • Create a pathway for long-term impact in language education through the engagement of future teachers as agents of change in their local communities.

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Research Collaborators:

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