Up-to-date research findings can be difficult to access. Paywalls stop people outside universities and research institutes from accessing published academic papers. And even if papers are openly available they are often written in highly technical language making understanding them difficult and time-consuming.
Open Accessible Summaries in Language Studies (OASIS) aims to make research in language learning, language teaching, and multilingualism accessible to people who might benefit from it, such as teachers, teacher educators, parents, and policy makers.
How do we do this?
OASIS is a publicly available database of accessible summaries. All summaries are a single page only and are written in easy to understand, non-technical language. They are either produced or read by the original researchers to make sure the summary is a fair representation of the study and its findings.
We have partnered up with some of the top journals in language learning and teaching. These journals are asking authors of newly published papers to write an accessible summary of their work. For OASIS this means the initiative is sustainable (we’re here to stay!). For our users this means access to the latest available language research.
We already have a few hundred summaries online and we are adding new ones every week. The database is fully searchable, so you can look for summaries in your specific area of interest. For example, filter by language being learnt to find summaries on learning English or filter by topic to find material on teaching vocabulary.
For further information, please visit the website or sign up for our monthly digest of new accessible summaries.