Student engagement in the multilingual classroom

The project examines three distinct dimensions of engagement: (a) engagement in the English language classroom, (b) engagement with school, and (c) engagement with learners’ language repertoire within and beyond school.

The project has the following aims:

to explore how Mittelschule (MS; middle school) learners’ engagement in the English language classroom changes during a task, a lesson, and an academic year.
to understand the combination of factors supporting or hindering their engagement over these multiple timescales.
to examine the engagement with school of MS learners, and how it changes across one academic year.
to understand how MS learners from different linguistic backgrounds engage with their full language repertoire, within and beyond school, during the course of one academic year.
to investigate the interconnections between engagement in the English language classroom, with school generally, and with diverse languages across multiple timescales, in order to create a comprehensive, multi-level model of language learning engagement for MS students in Austria.

The proposed project comprises two main phases:

In Phase I, participants are recruited from three English language classrooms in three distinct MS schools in Styria; two of which are based in an urban setting with a higher variety of linguistic backgrounds, and one based in a suburban area with a less linguistically diverse student population.

Data will be collected using the following tools:

classroom observations
video and audio recordings of lessons
real-time tracking of engagement
post-lesson interviews

Phase II of the project will be informed by the findings of Phase I and will involve a large-scale questionnaire survey distributed among several urban and non-urban public MS schools within the city of Graz and Styria more broadly.

The ultimate aim of the project is to better comprehend how to support and foster the academic achievement of students from all cultural, social, and linguistic backgrounds, while casting particular light on the engagement of multilingual MS learners.