Anne Burns
Burns
Anne Burns is an Australian applied linguist and Professor Emerita of TESOL at the University of New South Wales, with ongoing honorary posts at Aston University in the UK. Her career has been anchored in action research as a genre of teacher inquiry, and she has done more than almost anyone to make teacher-led research a respectable, usable tradition within ELT.
Burns's work does two things at once. It keeps action research methodologically serious — with clear cycles, explicit data, and honest writing-up — while refusing to hand it back to academics. Her writing is aimed squarely at teachers and teacher educators, and it resists the temptation to make classroom inquiry sound like a lesser cousin of university research.
Career
- PhD in applied linguistics
- Long career at Macquarie University's AMEP Research Centre, then at UNSW
- Honorary appointments at Aston University, UK
- Past president of IATEFL
Published Work
- Collaborative Action Research for English Language Teachers (1999)
- Doing Action Research in English Language Teaching (2010)
- The Cambridge Guide to Second Language Teacher Education (ed. with Jack Richards, 2009)
- Pedagogies for the Future: Researching Strategies for Success (2020)
Influence
- One of the two or three names most associated with action research in ELT globally
- Her cycle-based, accessible framework has been taken up in teacher development programmes worldwide
- Helped make IATEFL's Research SIG and similar communities credible spaces for classroom teachers