Research and development in Kievi

The Centre for Language and Communication Studies is perhaps understandably best known for its teaching and that has always been our main focus. However, naturally in a university setting, our focus has been on research-based teaching and we have had a flourishing research scene for a long time. Currently, we have ten staff who have a Ph.D. and two with a licentiate degree, seven who are actively engaged in doctoral studies, and many more who publish regularly in a variety of languages. Additionally, we are involved in a number of interesting projects that aim to assist both learners and teachers alike. In this short article, we give an overview of our approach to research and development.

Research

Research strategy: The research strategy we employ involves providing scaffolding to facilitate their research. This begins with a very low threshold approach to encourage those just beginning their research with Kielikeskus tutkii, to supporting travel to conferences and seminars, and to assisting teachers in their doctoral studies. We have a dedicated program that teachers can apply for each year, whereby they can receive a reduction in teaching load to give them more time for research. We also have a dedicated Teams channel to allow for quick communication of the latest ideas in our field.

Kielikeskus tutkii: We started our own in-house journal back in 2013 and we have produced it every two years since then (with an exception in the Covid years). The key goal was to encourage all staff to carry out research, particularly those to whom research was a relatively new thing. Another key goal has been to encourage collaboration both internally and externally. In 2017 we collaborated to create a joint edition with the University of Tampere Language Centre. The latest edition, Kielikeskus tutkii 6, was our most ambitious collaboration yet with 42 authors from six countries and 12 language centres. The main theme was related to digital pedagogy but also encompassed a wide variety of research topics relevant to language centre teaching. It has so far been downloaded more than 1300 times.

Latest research: In recent years, several of our teachers have received their doctoral degrees in the field of applied linguistics. In January 2025, Peter Levrai successfully defended his doctoral work 'Exploring Practitioner Collaborative Assessment Identity to Develop a Principled Multi-lens Approach to Assessing Collaborative Assignments in EAP'. For this, he a very prestigious award given by the British Association of Lecturers in English for Specific Purposes (BALEAP). In June, Veijo Vaakanainen successfully defended his thesis Dynamik och kontrast i konnektorbruket hos finska in lärares L2-svenska Then, in July, Averil Bolster defended her thesis, A qualitative Grounded Theory study of EAP practitioners and collaborative learning: identity and beliefs at the University of the Basque Country.

Kehittämishankkeet

Kievi is involved in a broad number of projects at the moment which promote language and communication learning across a wide spectrum of fields. These include the long-standing Multilingual in Business project aimed at helping business students in TSE prepare for the multilingual workplace.

We are part of the national Kivanet project, promoting the lesser taught languages by providing a learning platform for students across Finland. We also led the 2digi2 project on digital pedagogy providing teachers with a wealth of support and resources for teaching online.

We are heavily involved in projects related to Finnish as a Foreign Language including our Osus-hanke, which has completely re-worked all our S2 teaching. We have produced Suomipassi to help out-of-the-classroom learning for international students and staff and we are taking part in the Kohti-hanke to create new ways of learning Finnish.

We have just begun work on another OKM-funded project called Svenska Upp which will provide a study path for students struggling with Swedish.

You can see all our latest research and development on our Research and Development web pages.