Innovation in Language Education in the United Kingdom: Voices from the Four Nations

In this introductory chapter, we share the impetus for editing a book that focuses on innovation in language education in the United Kingdom. We begin with some statistics about the increasingly diverse range of languages that are used in the four nations. Amid the opportunities and challenges faced by those involved in language education in the United Kingdom, we make a case for the importance for practitioners and researchers to remain resilient and innovative. In this book, we define “innovation” as intentional and iterative processes to identify opportunities and design creative and context-specific solutions for real-world problems or improvements on current practices. We put forward a conceptual framework of “innovation” based on insights garnered from the book chapters comprising six dimensions, contexts, purpose, levels, process, output, and impact, and discuss with illustrations from relevant book chapters.