Student engagement in modern foreign languages : a pedagogical model

• Main Author: Pino James, Nicolás
• Published: University of Warwick 2015
• Subjects: 418.0071; LC Special aspects of education
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.682962

This study proposes a practitioner-oriented model for fostering student academic, social, emotional, and cognitive (ASEC) engagement in learning activities, and it assesses its potential to achieve such aims. The rationale underpinning this research is that the UK currently faces a social problem of negative attitudes towards foreign language learning. This is manifested by the steep decline in the number of schoolchildren that take up Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) in upper secondary education. In light of this, research has consistently demonstrated that attitudes towards learning languages can be transformed if we regularly provide students with engaging experiences in the classroom. Unfortunately, pedagogical solutions that guide secondary schoolteachers on how to engineer engaging classrooms on a daily basis are scarce in educational research. This study uses an action research approach to assess the potential of the proposed pedagogical model to stimulate student ASEC engagement in MFL contexts. This entails two consecutive implementations of the model among a group of 19 Year 9 (difficult and male-dominated) students of Spanish by means of two long-term learning activities. The results from both implementations seem to confirm that the proposed practitioner-oriented model can contribute to promoting student engagement in learning activities at academic, social, emotional, and cognitive levels when it is fully deployed. The study contributes to the field of MFL primarily by offering an assessed pedagogical model that can stimulate regular student ASEC engagement in the MFL classroom, which, in turn, may contribute to the positive transformation of student attitudes towards foreign language learning.