Professor Anne Burns is Professor of TESOL at the School of Education, University of New South Wales and Emeritus Professor in Language Education, School of Languages and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, UK.
Professor Burns has been the key reference person for the English Australia Action Research in ELICOS Program since the program’s inception in 2010. She runs three workshops with Program participants each year and provides feedback and advice to participants about their research projects and reports.
Anne has had considerable experience in planning, implementing and reporting on action research programs, has published and presented widely on the topic and is acknowledged internationally as an expert in action research. Her other research interests include language teacher education, language teacher cognition, applications of genre theory to language teaching, curriculum development and change, literacy, and written and spoken discourse analysis.
Nominations should present a case for how an institution or teacher(s) have integrated and sustained Action Research as part of their curriculum or professional development program. The nomination will consist of a written text addressing each of the following criteria in no more than 250 words per criterion:
• Evidence of how AR has been taken up/integrated as part of curriculum and/or professional development.
• The impact of this integration on the institution and/or on teachers or students at the college.
• Evidence of the institution’s or teachers’ continuing commitment to AR.
The winning institution or teacher will receive AUD$1500 to be used to further promote action research within the ELICOS sector, within their institution or within their own further research development.
The winning institution or teacher also receives: a certificate; profiling on the English Australia website; and use of the English Australia award winner logo on their email signature.
Institutions
The Grant is open to any ELICOS institution that has aligned with the English Australia Action Research (AR) in ELICOS Program or has instituted its own program of AR/teacher research. Institutions should demonstrate how they have initiated and maintained AR as part of ongoing development and improvement in professional development, curriculum development, assessment or resources development.
Teachers
The Grant is also open to teachers, individually or as a group, who have conducted AR, perhaps through participation in the Action Research in ELICOS Program, and then gone on to sustain their research through ongoing initiatives such as further AR projects, conference presentations, journal publications, or engagement in higher education research. Teachers should demonstrate how AR was a catalyst to these further developments and how it has sustained their further development.
Judging
The winning teacher will be selected by a judging panel comprising:
2026 nominations for the 2025 Anne Burns Action Research Grant will open in April 2026.
Contact Sophie at: [email protected].
The winners of the 2025 Anne Burns Action Research Grant are Gabriel Azpilcueta and Heather Sparrow from University of Adelaide’s English Language Centre.
Gabriel and Heather are English teachers at the University of Adelaide ELC. They participated in the 2024 Action Research in ELICOS program, where they developed a passion for classroom-based research. This year, they conducted action research at their institution to trial the use of Microsoft’s Learning Accelerators for reading and speaking. Through a critical Action Research approach, they integrated these tools into their curricula. In addition, Gabriel and Heather have run professional development sessions about action research at their centre and they have supported other teachers to undertake action research. They have also presented their research at industry events such as PD Fests and the NSW EduTech Conference.
2024 – The University of Adelaide’s English Language Centre
2023 – The Centre for English Teaching and The Learning Hub
2021 – UNSW Global
2020 – UTS Insearch
2019 – Monash College
