The need for evidence-based practice and data-driven decisions in language education has never been as urgent as it is in the 21st Century. Yet language education, like education in general, continues to be afflicted by a blatant gap between research and practice.
The consensus that has emerged over several decades of debate is that we need more teacher researchers and researcher teachers working together to bridge this gap. Teacher researchers are teachers who have received formal training in research methodologies, and who can read and interpret published research, engage in reflective practice, and actively participate in communities of practice within and beyond their own contexts and institutions. Some teacher researchers can also conduct applied research for the purpose of exploring their classrooms, piloting new practices, and evaluating efficacies with or without the support of academics.  Researcher teachers, on the other hand, are academics and scholars who continue to teach language for communicative purposes, rather than only theories and methods, and regularly collaborate with language teachers as equals in the knowledge creation process. Researcher teachers and teacher researchers are natural partners in the realization of evidence-based and data-driven language education.
The Language Centre of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, as a service center charged with meeting the language learning needs of a dynamic multilingual and multicultural university community, fully embraces evidence-based practices and data-driven decisions in language education. We aspire to foster the development of reflective practitioners and teacher researchers among our teaching staff and we welcome collaboration with researcher teachers in the realization of our institutional objectives.

It is with our raison d'être in mind that we are organizing a full-day international conference to bring together language teaching practitioners who engage in reflection or research and academics who are focused on language teaching applications. The conference comprises practical presentations which offer training in, tips for, and examples of reflection and research conducted by and for language teachers.