Understanding the linkage gap between L2 education researchers and teachers

This paper reports the results of a mixed-method study that analyzed second language (L2) teachers’ and researchers’ interactions on an online forum organized to facilitate the discussion of six published articles written by the participating researchers. The project used Lavis et al.’s (2003) knowledge transfer framework and Graham et al. (2006) knowledge to action framework as foundations to create shared space with the view to addressing the linkage gap between L2 researchers and L2 teachers. It specifically created a virtual space for dialogue and brought the two groups together to discuss topics of common interest. The asynchronous interaction produced a text-based set of data that reflected the ideational and linguistic choices of the participants. We use textlinguistic analysis procedures and refer to Gee’s (1990) Discourse theory to interpret these choices and understand how they shaped the direction and content of the interaction between researchers and practitioners.