In recent years, middle schools (Mittelschule, MS) across Austria have faced several challenges in reducing the achievement gap between students from a migrant background and their non-migrant peers. To understand how achievement of all MS learners can be supported, the proposed project turns to the construct of engagement. A large body of research in educational psychology has associated school engagement with positive academic outcomes, such as higher grades and school completion rates (Fredricks et al., 2004). Within Second Language Acquisition (SLA), the limited body of research on engagement has mainly addressed two areas. The first area focuses on learners’ engagement with learning activities (Philp & Duchesne, 2016), while the second area concerns engagement with language (Svalberg, 2009). There is a need to expand on this with naturalistic empirical research examining how engagement functions and interconnects in different contexts such as the task, lesson, school, and language (Hiver et al., 2021). The proposed project aims to investigate MS learners’ engagement with the tasks that occur during the L2 lesson, with school, and with the multiple languages they encounter within and beyond school, in order to draw a comprehensive model of engagement that encompasses multiple systemic levels of granularity, timescales, and contexts.

The proposed project employs a two-phase sequential mixed-method research design. In Phase I, dense longitudinal data on dynamic fluctuations in engagement across the language lesson and throughout the academic year will be collected employing the following tools: (a) classroom observations; (b) video and audio recordings of each lesson; (c) Experience Sampling Method; (d) post-lesson interviews with students based on stimulated-recall procedures.

Phase II of the project will be informed by the findings of Phase I and will involve a large-scale questionnaire survey. The first key point of innovation of this study is the investigation of engagement across three levels of granularity, timescales, and contexts, which will broaden theoretical knowledge of this construct generally and within language education specifically. Furthermore, the study redefines and expands the construct of ‘engagement with language’ to encompass learners’ whole linguistic repertoire, thus enabling a holistic understanding of the complexity of engagement in multilingual settings. Another key point of innovation of the study lies in its methodology, which accommodates the real-time investigation of the dynamic trajectories of student engagement across their corresponding levels of granularity, timescales, and layers of contexts in a naturalistic setting.

Duration	01.09.2022 - 31.08.2025
Funding Funding program	FWF ESPRIT Program
Grant amount	294.015,98
Unit	Department of English Studies
Principal investigator	Giulia Sulis, MA. PhD
Project staff	Univ.-Prof. Sarah Jane Mercer, B.A. M.A. M.Sc. Ph.D
Homepage