Understanding low outcomes in English language education in Austrian middle schools: the role of teachers’ beliefs and practices

Abstract

The educational disparities that can be found in the English language learning outcomes of middle school students in Austria have gone relatively unexplored in international research. National studies have tended to attribute lower educational outcomes either to students' socioeconomic status or their multilingual background. In this article, we use the theory of intersectionality to shed new light on how educational disparities that run along socioeconomic lines are tightly entangled with beliefs about students' multilingualism, arguing that these two factors must be explored in tandem to understand educational disadvantage in this context. Our study brings together a rich description of the educational context with a quantitative exploration via questionnaire of the beliefs and classroom practices of 56 English teachers at Austrian middle schools. Analyses of the data allow insight into how teachers' beliefs about their students' abilities, motivations and access to English outside of school and teachers' language use in the classroom all relate to the lower outcomes in English at Austrian middle schools. The article closes by considering the importance of the findings for policy and practice in English language education in Austria, including ideas for the transformation of these.

Teachers' multilingual beliefs and practices in English classrooms: A scoping review

“…Persistent beliefs and norms about language teaching, such as the 'monolingual myth', continue to form a main obstacle to multilingual teaching practices (Escobar & Dillard-Paltrineri, 2015;Flognfeldt et al, 2020;Inbar-Lourie, 2010), in accordance with Canagarajah (2013) andMeier (2016). Traditional native-speaker ideals are identified in several studies (e.g., Bayyurt et al, 2019;Calafato, 2020a), as well as views about harmful effects of drawing on other languages in English teaching (Calafato, 2020a(Calafato, , 2020bErling et al, 2020Erling et al, , 2021Jakisch, 2014), corroborating the findings from Pfenninger (2014). Further studies confirm the existence of outdated views on language learning, such as the belief that languages must be learned successively (Burner & Carlsen, 2022) and English-only policies motivated by a nativespeaker are ideal (McMillan & Rivers, 2011;cf.…”

“…Findings from surveys of English teachers in Erling et al (2020, 2021) ( n = 162) indicate that a substantial number of teachers disagree that students' L1 should be encouraged to be used in the English classroom and they were less convinced about the benefits of English when learning an additional language than other studies described above indicated. Two of the three teachers in Jakisch (2014) similarly expressed scepticism about the usefulness of building on English when learning additional foreign languages because of characteristics of English compared to other languages.…”

Teacher Cognition and Practice of Educational Equity in English as a Foreign Language Teaching

“…These findings can be thought provoking for EFL teachers who are involved in the global educational system to reflect on their pedagogical thoughts and deeds. Given the crucial role teachers play in dismantling inequities that hinder students’ development and in closing the academic gap, it is a good sign that equity, as a common concern in the English language teaching area ( Erling et al, 2020 ), has become a long-term pursuit for EFL teachers with equitable visions both at home and abroad. Furthermore, since equity is perceived as an important predictor of students’ self-efficacy ( Daemi et al, 2017 ), this study has important implications for educational experts and policy-makers concerning how to include more voices from culturally and linguistically diverse students and how to verify whether teachers are incorporating equity into their classroom practices ( Riordan et al, 2019 ).…”

Is Segregated Language Support Fit for Purpose? Insights From German Language Support Classes in Austria

“…In the 2019/20 school year, almost 27% of the 1,135,519 students enrolled in schools in Austria had German as an additional language (GAL) -in the city of Vienna the proportion is about 53% (Statistik Austria, 2021). Students with GAL and from migration backgrounds face significant disadvantages in the Austrian educational system (Erling et al, 2020;Herzog-Punzenberger, 2017;Schreiner et al, 2020;Suchań et al, 2019). Based on Austria's low results in PISA 2018, the Austrian Court of Audit released a critique of the education system.…”