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.