Plenaries

Charles R. Graham

Brigham Young University

Learner Engagement in Blended and Online Learning Environments

Powerpoint presentation

Learner engagement is widely studied and has even been called the “holy grail” of learning (Sinatra et al., 2015) because it is often strongly correlated to positive outcomes that we care about such as student performance, student satisfaction, persistence among others. Also, engagement is often researched because unlike learning outcomes or specific performance outcomes, engagement can be measured and compared across content domains and instructional modalities.

This presentation will explore some of the complexities of researching learner engagement including efforts to measure learner engagement in blended and online learning contexts. We will explore how researchers are defining engagement and identifying indicators of engagement. Because engagement is commonly considered to be a multidimensional construct, we will identify some of the most common dimensions of engagement that researchers are looking at, including affective, behavioral, and cognitive dimensions. We will look at ways that these dimensions are measured including some efforts in online learning to use proxy measures, like log data from learning management systems, to measure student engagement.

In addition to exploring indicators of engagement, the presentation will explore important categories of engagement facilitators such as learner characteristics, community facilitators, and learning environment facilitators. Engagement facilitators are important because they represent the factors outside of the construct that we hypothesize are influencing engagement. The development of the Academic Communities of Engagement (ACE) framework (Borup et al., 2020; 2023) will be used as an example to demonstrate how both indicators and facilitators of engagement are combined into a comprehensive model that can be used by researchers and other institutional stakeholders to better understand learner engagement at the course and institutional levels.

André Tricot

Epsylon - Research group in Psychology - Université Paul Valéry - Montpellier 

Presentation in French with English slides

Learning through teaching with digital tools: how can we improve learner engagement?

Powerpoint presentation

Empirical literature on the use of digital tools to improve learner motivation shows very disappointing results. In general, younger students say they are more interested, but this does not really impact their motivation. For adult learners, the results are particularly divergent. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the literature on learner engagement (particularly cognitive engagement) is more promising today. This is particularly the case for modern language learning. In this presentation, I will therefore review what we know today about how to improve learner engagement, particularly with digital tools, especially for modern languages. I'll also point out that improving engagement does not systematically result in better learning. Thus it is a factor that teachers and tool designers can influence, but only under specific conditions.

Giulia Sulis

Universität Graz

Engagement defines the depth and quality of the learning experience (Mercer, 2019), and is thus considered an essential component of learning. Two key characteristics of learning engagement are its dynamicity and situatedness (Hiver et al., 2021). Engagement changes over time as learners interact with their environment; as such, it is malleable and responsive to intervention (Mercer, 2019). While there have been increasing calls to explicitly address the temporal dimension in engagement research and understand the conditions for sustaining it over time (Hiver et al., 2021), most research on language learning engagement conducted to date has drawn on cross-sectional surveys examining engagement at one moment in time (see, e.g., Aubrey et al., 2020; Sulis, 2022, as exceptions). However, examining the temporal dimension of engagement in authentic language learning contexts, both within and beyond the language classroom, can provide valuable insights for researchers and educators to enhance instructional strategies, identify and address learning challenges, and ensure adequate conditions for sustained learner involvement (Hiver et al., 2021; Xie et al., 2023).
Drawing on data collected in Austrian middle schools, this presentation examines four distinct research approaches that can be adopted to examine learning engagement in authentic language learning contexts from a temporal perspective: Experience Sampling Method (ESM), Video Enhanced Observation (VEO), stimulated recall, and classroom observations. This presentation will identify the advantages and challenges of implementing each research approach, and propose an integrated approach which combines the strengths of the four methods. It will then offer practical implications in terms of triggering and sustaining learner engagement, and addressing disengagement in the language classroom. Finally, the presentation will conclude by providing recommendations for future research addressing the temporal dimension of engagement in authentic language learning contexts.