This final chapter revisits all the issues discussed in the textbook in light of their applicability to the real classroom, that is, the relationship between research and practice. It argues for the importance of considering the usefulness of research if and when a researcher hopes to influence classroom teaching via their research. The chapter begins with a description as to how research in general is connected to our daily lives (e.g., medicine, engineering, education). It then overviews the research examining the impact of research on educational practices including second language teaching. Practical and epistemological obstacles to bridging the research–practice gap from practitioners’ and researchers’ sides are discussed. The chapter proposes a variety of actions that practitioners and researchers can take in order to foster a bidirectional, constructive, productive, equitable, and mutually beneficial relationship. The chapter ends with a series of activities designed to ensure the learning outcomes from the textbook.

The privatization of government functions has given rise to instrumental questions concerning the execution of these functions. Proponents often hail the efficiency of private institutions, while opponents often speak of the accountability of public institutions. This chapter challenges the instrumentalist terms of this debate. It establishes that there are principled, noninstrumentalist arguments against the privatization of certain goods. More particularly, it argues that there are goods that are “inherently public,” namely that they cannot be provided by private entities, even in principle.

The chapter also maintains that to count as an act of the state, the person who provides the good (the key case studies are inflicting criminal punishment and waging wars) must be a public official. To defend this latter position, the chapter develops an abstract account of public officials as agents who defer to the state’s judgments.

How stylistically sophisticated can the use of morpholexical/morphosyntactic variation be? By focusing on the range of social meanings that can be articulated by ‘levelled were’ (e.g., she were funny) – a regionally restricted variant of the type most frequently studied in sociolinguistics – this chapter explores the extent to which social meanings are fixed by a variant’s enduring association with place. It first considers how children acquire linguistic variation and the extent to which this process interacts with their ability to vary grammatical items stylistically. The analysis then explores how levelled were patterns by social class, parental place of birth, and community of practice at Midlan High. It provides evidence that all of these factors play a role in the use of levelled were, but that the most robust correlation is with community of practice. This data is used to argue that grammatical variants can mark distinctive social styles and personas, and that speakers can adapt their use of variation providing that (i) they have access to a range of variants, and (ii) that they are motivated to use them by virtue of its utility to them as a social symbol.

Schools are technology rich. Teachers routinely now use digital tools for reporting, communications within school and with parents, for maintaining class records, for preparing materials and so on. Some schools use online teaching programs or electronic textbooks. With NAPLAN moving to become fully online (see Chapter 19) there is a need for both teachers and students across the primary years to be confident and creative users of digital technology. Each chapter in this book has included examples and strategies for integrating digital tools into the teaching of mathematics across a range of mathematical content areas.

This chapter outlines established disciplines that have addressed the study of clichés, from lexicography to formulaic language and problematises the issue of defining clichés based on form. The chapter positions linguistic clichés within discourse studies and conceptualises them as socio-semiotic resources and discourse strategies that fulfil a range of specific functions across different discourse types and sites. The chapter also provides a working definition of cliches and outlines what constitutes cliches for the purposes of the book.

In many undergraduate psychology programs, students gain research experience through intentional scaffolded experiences throughout the undergraduate curriculum and in some cases by joining a faculty member’s research program outside of the classroom. In sustained undergraduate research experiences, students benefit from developmentally appropriate mentoring as they gradually develop and master skills, an approach often compared to an apprenticeship model. Many psychology faculty use evidence-based mentoring practices, such as the Salient Practices Framework, which was developed by an international, multi-institutional research team. Examples include setting clear and incremental expectations and supporting students as they transfer more basic skills learned in the classroom to conducting community or field-based research. There are creative and evidence-based ways to improve access for all students by being more intentional about embedding research experiences in the psychology curricula, or by further considering ways to recruit and retain UR students from historically underserved groups.

The Maastricht Research Based Learning program for Excellence (MaRBLe) is an extension of Maastricht University’s leading educational approach, that is, Problem-Based Learning (PBL). PBL emphasizes that learning should be constructive, take place in context, in collaboration with others, and driven by self-direction. The 4C/ID model has proven to be helpful to identify shared principles for Research-Based Learning (RBL). These principles has proven very supportive in the transition from PBL to RBL, and to work toward further harmonization of the RBL practices at Maastricht University without jeopardizing the way they are tailored to the needs of a particular scientific domain, students in this domain, as well as other conditions. RBL was introduced via a true bottom-up approach, giving room to early adaptors that functioned as pioneers in their faculty. Lessons learned vary from the necessity to have a stable community of practice as a basis for exchange and further development and the focus on empowering students in the development of their academic research skills.

This chapter explores the mechanisms and measures for implementing and evaluating the impact of networking practices in the online higher education environment. It draws on the extensive experience of a fully online Australian business school for working adults in using social networking and social activities to enhance learning, build community, impact professional advancement and create lifelong learning opportunities for alumni. This chapter also offers key insights into a pertinent question regarding the extent to which social activities should be facilitated by the institution, be self-initiated and administered by students or alumni themselves or be a hybrid of the two. Using the example of the Australian Institute of Business, we demonstrate that the latter is the most effective approach. The evidence-based best practices contributing to mutually beneficial formal and informal interactions are discussed in terms of student-centred institutional networking and engagement initiatives, networking opportunities using social media platforms, institutional benchmarking and data collection and institutional further learning activities.

This chapter reviews research that examines the fundamental cognitive and social processes whereby people learn to read and write. The chapter discusses three types of literate knowledge. First, literacy can be general, such as the ability to decode words or engage in drafting and revision. Second, literacy can be task-specific: learning to read a novel and learning to read a recipe require different declarative and procedural knowledge. Third, literacy can be community-specific, in which members of a community approach a given text using different cognitive and interpretive frameworks. Learning how to read and write requires many distinct cognitive components, from decoding letters to composing and interpreting texts. Literacy also requires the ability to integrate these skills within communities of practice, and these findings are aligned with sociocultural perspectives on learning in all subjects.

This chapter reviews how people learn during apprenticeships, ways of guiding beginners while they engage in authentic situated activity with more experienced people. Apprenticeship practices are found throughout the world both in cultures with formal schooling and in those without. Traditional apprenticeship practices tend to focus on physical and visible activities, but most schooling is directed toward conceptual learning outcomes which are usually not physical and visible – like formulas in mathematics or theories in physics. This chapter extends apprenticeship research to cognitive apprenticeship, and describes apprenticeships that are designed to lead to abstract or conceptual knowledge. These involve scaffolding, metacognitive reflection, problem-based learning, and situated social practices. Effective apprenticeship often involves productive failure, when learners initially develop potential solutions that are wrong but that can be productively guided toward conceptually correct answers.

How do actors construct complexity? This chapter looks at the ways and extent of influence by epistemic communities and communities of practice in shaping the global agenda on environmental governance, in the shadow of concerns about complexity. Employing Emanuel Adler’s new theoretical framework it argues that environmental governance has emerged through a process of cognitive evolution heavily shaped by epistemic communities.

Chapter 9 offers a summary of findings and general conclusions with regard to (1) evidentiality in English, (2) constructions, interactions, and change, (3) the House of Commons as a community of practice in change (and Prime Minister’s Questions as an activity in change), and (4) the potential for a new research strand, Diachronic Interactional (Socio-)Linguistics.