Motivation is energy. It is especially crucial in education, as it is the stimulus that pushes individuals to make choices, to act, to invest effort, to persist and to show dedication for a particular task (Dörnyei & Ushioda 2011). This contribution focusses on teachers' perspectives on ways of motivating students in their learning (Dörnyei & Kubanyiova 2014), within multilingual education settings (Lasagabaster 2017). The findings we will be reporting on are from a study that was carried out in the two regions of the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) in Spain, and of Friuli Venezia Giulia (FVG) in Italy. The former context is internationally known as a success case of revitalisation of a minority language, Basque, within a multilingual educational system that also includes Spanish and English (Cenoz 2009). The latter context, FVG, which is less known in international educational research, is as well characterised by linguistic diversity, and great efforts are being made there to implement the teaching of the Friulian minority language in schools, while it coexists with Italian and English in the curriculum (Burelli 2015).
Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 30 in-service primary and secondary school teachers, from the BAC and FVG, and data were analysed by means of content analysis. Following Henry et al. (2019), activities reported by teachers were codified based on five themes: focus and content of activities (e.g. students' interests and everyday issues), materials used (e.g. authentic materials), outcome (e.g. final performance), challenge (e.g. competition), personal expression (e.g. creativity). Activities were categorised based on the language/s in which they were carried out.
Our findings indicate that, although teachers show a certain degree of awareness of the motivational power of leveraging students' whole linguistic repertoire as a means to carry out more authentic and challenging activities, practices still tend to focus on one language at a time. Furthermore, differences between the two contexts are noticeable, especially as regards the use of the minority language. Implications for teacher training practice will also be explored.
This presentation wishes to contribute to the discussion about effective teaching within multilingual education systems, where a minority language co-exists with a national majority language, a lingua franca and additional immigrant languages. Our contribution may thus be of interest for other researchers working in similar contexts and sharing the concern as to how multilingual education can change dominant language ideologies and foster more inclusive teaching and learning practices.
Burelli, A. (2015). Il Friulano nella scuola (e nell'università). In S. Heinemann & L. Melchior (Eds.), Manuale di linguistica friulana (pp. 575-598). De Gruyter.
Cenoz, J. (2009). Towards Multilingual Education: Basque Educational Research from an International Perspective. Multilingual Matters.
Dörnyei, Z., & Kubanyiova, M. (2014). Motivating learners, motivating teachers: Building vision in the language classroom. Cambridge University Press.
Dörnyei, Z., & Ushioda, E. (2011). Teaching and Researching: Motivation. Routledge.
Henry, A., Sundqvist, P., & Thorsen, C. (2019). Motivational Practice. Insights from the Classroom. Studentlitteratur.
Lasagabaster, D. (2017). Language Learning Motivation and Language Attitudes in Multilingual Spain From an International Perspective. The Modern Language Journal, 101(3), pp. 583-596.
