This chapter highlights work undertaken on behalf of the UK Police Force’s National Negotiation Group, which ultimately formed part of an impact case study submitted to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021. The project was designed to showcase how ‘linguistics in action’ can inform and improve police crisis negotiation training, and explored forty-two crisis incidents representative of different crisis incidents using a combination of (quantitative) corpus linguistic techniques and (qualitative) pragmatic analysis. In addition to introducing the author’s argument for basing crisis negotiation (training) on the what, the why, and, very importantly, the linguistic how of conducting crisis negotiation (Archer & Stott, 2020: see also Archer & Smithson, 2015; Archer et al. 2018; Archer, 2020), the chapter reflects upon on the possibility of future applications and potential barriers to such continuing impact. This inspires a discussion, in turn, as to whether/the extent to which ‘practitioners’ perceive measurements of impact differently to processes like the REF (Anderson et al., 2017) and a potential need, in consequence, to (re)assess the notion of ‘impact’ within academia.

Doing useful research, or wanting to do research, or not having sufficient skills to do research are ongoing concerns for teachers, despite an increasing expectation that teacher research should be part of a teacher’s professional life. Cases in this chapter look at high school teacher-researchers in Vietnam, an MA student choosing a dissertation topic in the UK, and an ethical dilemma experienced by a student teacher while on a teaching practicum in the US.

This section describes the various components of the case, including keywords, pre-reading reflection, the case itself, discussion questions, research topics, and reading resources.

This chapter leverages the IdiomsTube project to illustrate how corpus linguistics enhances research and tool development for formulaic language acquisition. Formulaic language, encompassing idioms, proverbs, and sayings, is common in everyday communication. However, English as a foreign language (EFL) learners often struggle with these conventionalised expressions due to limited exposure to authentic spoken contexts. To address this challenge, the IdiomsTube project conducted corpus studies to uncover patterns in formulaic language use, including prosodic features and distribution across internet television genres. Corpus linguistic methods have also enabled the development of the IdiomsTube app, a specialised tool for computer-assisted formulaic language learning. Informed by corpus-derived frequency data and innovative concordancer design, the app uniquely prioritises user experience. Unlike conventional concordancers, the IdiomsTube app dynamically compiles a corpus from captions retrieved in real-time from YouTube videos based on the user’s search word, allowing users to read concordance lines from current, trending videos. This design makes concordancing engaging and motivating for learners. This chapter demonstrates how modernising concordancer designs with a focus on learner accessibility and real-time content can significantly advance formulaic language acquisition.

This opening chapter goes straight to the heart of what language teachers do – classroom teaching. It includes cases set in seven different countries and in primary, high, and private language schools, as well as college and university. It covers topics as diverse as teaching in large classes, translanguaging, and using AI in an academic writing class.

Some teachers and teacher educators take on quite significant leadership roles, such as serving as a new president of a teacher association in Thailand, but all teachers exhibit leadership in some way. It may be relatively small-scale, such as attempting to decolonize the curriculum in one program in Colombia or establishing a collaborative teacher research group in a school in Botswana. Diverse teacher leadership possibilities such as these are represented in the cases in this chapter.

Despite the growing interest in sign language acquisition, learner corpora and datasets remain scarce, with many studies focusing primarily on isolated signs. Expanding the scope from single signs to sentences requires continuous sign language data, which introduces additional complexity due to the need to analyse both manual and non-manual components of the language. This chapter presents the compilation process and exploitation of a longitudinal learner (L2) corpus for Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS), one of three sign languages used in Switzerland. The L2 data are complemented by a parallel control subcorpus of native signers (L1). Both subcorpora are designed to support research in sign language linguistics, language assessment, and the training of computer-vision-based sign language recognition systems. The implications of this corpus extend beyond linguistic research, offering practical applications for developing automatic feedback tools to support L2 learners while learning DSGS. This chapter outlines the data collection process, from participant recruitment to data processing and annotation, and presents preliminary results from exploratory analyses of non-manual components using L1 data.

All teachers are in some way involved in the assessment of their learners, whether it be informal classroom-based assessments or preparing them for external examinations. This chapter offers cases that raise dilemmas teachers face when their work relates to language learner assessment. It covers topics such as too much internal assessment, the pressure of external public examinations, post-entry university language assessment, and students copying off each other.

In data-driven learning (DDL), learners discover how words or phrases are used by analysing corpus data with tools like concordancers. This makes it a direct application of corpus linguistics in language learning and teaching. This chapter examines the use of ColloCaid, a DDL writing assistant for academic writing, and explores how learners’ perceptions of this tool can inform future corpus applications. After discussing the challenges and opportunities of DDL adoption for learning and teaching, a diary study with twelve academic writers working or studying at a university in Catalonia evaluates how well ColloCaid addresses these challenges. Results suggest that while DDL tools help reduce data overload, they still pose technical challenges, even when user friendliness was a central consideration in their design. An analysis of participant diary entries and responses to follow-up interviews highlights closer integration with word processors and other everyday productivity software as a potential solution. More broadly, the results suggest that the evaluation of corpus-based tools should focus on their usability as well as their effectiveness for learning, take place beyond the classroom in ecologically valid contexts, and consider a variety of text types beyond typical academic genres such as abstracts, essays, and reports.

The Introduction describes case method pedagogy from both a historical and theoretical perspective. It provides an author statement, and describes what cases are, what the benefits of the case method are for teachers, and outlines the organization of the casebook.

Teachers’ relationships with their students are the focus of this chapter. These relationships can determine the outcomes of learning, but also affect the professional and emotional lives of teachers. The cases in this chapter examine how teacher-student relationships unfold in diverse multicultural contexts and cover topics such as being a Black teacher in Japan, compromising the privacy of a gay primary school teacher in Canada, and knowing students’ names.

Each case in this chapter examines the experiences of a language learner from a different country, usually from the perspective of their teacher. Learners are the people who teachers interact with the most in their professional lives and are often the cause of dilemmas they encounter. The chapter covers topics such as gender identity in the classroom, teaching dedicated older learners, and teaching a learner with suspected ADHD.