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Britain's already poor record for language learning might be exacerbated by the Global English phenomenon, in that utilitarian reasons for learning languages other than English are increasingly undermined. This article offers a state-of-the-art review of UK research on second language (L2) learning motivation and attitude. The introduction is dedicated to a review of language education policy and numerical evidence on the decline in language learning. Part I reviews UK motivational literature under the headings Primary school; Secondary school; University and beyond; Teachers, parents, milieu. The evaluation of the literature reveals some striking lacunae, as well as a misfit between common explanations of the UK's language learning crisis and the social divide between those who choose to learn languages and those who do not. A motivation-in-context understanding of UK language learning needs to account for the many contradictory Other influences impacting on learner motivation. Therefore, Part II presents a new motivational model, based on Higgins's Self-Discrepancy Theory, a model which includes multifaceted Others as well as Own selves, including that of resistance/rebellion against Others. (Verlag).

We assess the impact of large-scale fee elimination for secondary school girls in The Gambia on the quantity, composition, and achievement of students. The gradual rollout of the program across geographic regions provides identifying variation in the policy. The program increased the number of girls taking the high school exit exam by 55%. The share of older test takers increased in poorer districts, expanding access for students who began school late, repeated grades, or whose studies had been interrupted. Despite these changes in the quantity and composition of students, we find robustly positive point estimates of the program on test scores, with suggestive evidence of gains for several subgroups of both girls and boys. Absence of learning declines is notable in a setting where expanded access could strain limited resources and reduce school quality. Our findings suggest that financial constraints remain serious barriers to post-primary education, and that efforts to expand access to secondary education need not come at the expense of learning in low-income countries like The Gambia.

Bilingual classrooms most often have strict language arrangements about when and who should speak what language to whom. This practice responds to diglossic arrangements and models of bilingualism developed in the 20th century. However, in the 21st century, heteroglossic bilingual conceptualizations are needed in which the complex discursive practices of multilingual students, their translanguagings, are used in sense-making and in tending to the singularities in the pluralities that make up multilingual classrooms today. Examining the case of a network of U.S. secondary schools for newcomer immigrants, the International High Schools, this article looks at how students' plurilingual abilities are built through seven principles that support dynamic plurilingual practices in instruction-heterogeneity, collaboration, learner-centeredness, language and content integration, language use from students up, experiential learning, and local autonomy and responsibility. As a result, students become not only more knowledgeable and academically successful but also more confident users of academic English, better at translanguaging, and more plurilingual-proficient. The article presents translanguaging in education as the constant adaptation of linguistic resources in the service of meaning-making and in tending to the singularities in the pluralities that make up multilingual classrooms today. (Verlag).

Throughout the world, schools are visited by students with different native languages. Therefore, the linguistic competencies of the students are diverse. Dealing with this diversity is a great challenge for teachers in general, including in science subjects. To face this challenge, all institutions involved in education should adapt their teaching and learning to linguistic diversity to foster student's language competencies. Non-formal education, such as student laboratories, could enhance formal chemistry education and support students in learning the subject's contents and acquiring language competencies. To this purpose, language-sensitive and language-supportive learning settings for different chemical topics and contexts are developed to enable all students to participate actively and foster language competencies. The learning settings are implemented and evaluated at the Ludwigsburg University of Education (Germany) using a cyclical approach based on Participatory Action Research. Data from 147 students from seven learning groups of various grade levels and school types were collected before and after they experienced the work in student laboratories. The focus was on students' situational interests and their views on offered language-sensitive and language-supportive methods, tools, and activities. The data shows that the approach has a positive effect on students' situational interest. Methods that were especially helpful for the students are filtered. On this basis, implications are drawn for the application to other non-formal education offers. (DIPF/Orig.).

The article presents one of the topics generated by a thematic analysis of data collected through a focus group process within the scientific research project LGBT (In)Visibility in School: The Educators' Perspective, which focused on the taboo position of sexual and gender diversity within the education system. In four focus groups conducted with secondary school educators in Zagreb, the participants identified certain key factors in perpetuating such a position: the understanding of the child/student as an innocent being whose sexual education should begin at a time that educators themselves are unable to determine, the perception of parents as barriers to the inclusion of topics of sexual and gender diversity in the curriculum, and the absence of a systematic, LGBT-inclusive approach to teaching about sexuality. The concluding part of the article discusses the limitations of the research conducted and makes recommendations for future empirical and practical coverage of this topic. (DIPF/Orig.).

The authors analyze the subtle mechanisms at work in the interaction between families and schools that underlie social inequalities at the transition point from elementary school into secondary-school tracks in Berlin, Germany. They do so by combining quantitative data from a large-scale survey and assessment study (N = 3,935 students and their parents) with qualitative data from in-depth interviews with parents (N = 25) collected during the 2010-11, 2011-12, and 2012-13 school years. The quantitative analyses show that students from high-socioeconomic status (SES) families were more likely to enter the academic track than were students from low-SES families, even if they performed equally well on a standardized achievement test, had the same grades in school, and received the same track recommendation from their teachers. The qualitative analyses illustrate the many ways in which parents intervene during the transition process, with high-SES parents having particularly effective ways of getting what they want for their children. (DIPF/Orig.).

Research has painted a pessimistic picture of students' second language (L2) writing skills in secondary education. One innovative tool that may help students foster their L2 proficiency, including writing ability, is in-class debate. Debate is commonly associated with oral communication and argumentation skills. However, debate may also offer advantages as an effective vehicle for L2 writing instruction. This study evaluates the effect of a debate intervention on the writing competence of Dutch secondary-school students. The intervention consisted of a number of speaking and writing activities, including case writing and note taking. The study, which employed a pretest-posttest design with a control group, involved 8 classes at 3 secondary schools in the Netherlands (N = 146). To measure the effect of the intervention, the authors analyzed two opinion writing tasks produced by the students: just prior to the first debate (pretest) and approximately 10 weeks later (posttest). The authors used a variety of measures, tapping into different aspects of writing performance, including fluency, syntactic and lexical complexity, accuracy, and cohesion. Multilevel analysis of the data revealed that the students in the intervention group significantly improved on a number of measures in comparison to the control group. (Verlag, adapt.).

While much has been written about task-based language teaching (TBLT), research examining teachers' understandings of what TBLT means remains limited. This article explores the understandings of TBLT of three Chinese secondary school teachers of English and the implementation of TBLT in their lessons. Narrative accounts were constructed for each teacher using observational data from two lessons and two semi-structured interviews. These accounts illustrate how each teacher implemented the curriculum as well as the cognitive and contextual factors that shaped their decisions with specific reference to the use of tasks. One key finding is that TBLT was defined in a narrow manner and was strongly associated with communicative activities, especially oral work involving pair and group work. The study also shows that the two more experienced teachers introduced a stronger formal element of grammar into their lessons than recommended by the curriculum; and while all three teachers highlighted the challenges for them in using tasks (e.g. due to large classes), the youngest of the three displayed most commitment to the principles in the curriculum. The qualitative accounts we present here are empirically instructive in the way they extend our understandings of how teachers respond to innovative curricula and specifically to TBLT; these accounts also have concrete practical value: they are a source of material that can be used in teacher education contexts to encourage teachers to reflect on their own beliefs and practices in relation to TBLT. (Verlag).

Adaptive collaborative learning support (ACLS) involves collaborative learning environments that adapt their characteristics, and sometimes provide intelligent hints and feedback, to improve individual students' collaborative interactions. ACLS often involves a system that can automatically assess student dialogue, model effective and ineffective collaboration, and provide relevant support. While there is evidence that ACLS can improve student learning, little is known about why systems that incorporate ACLS are effective. Does relevant support improve student interactions by providing just-in-time feedback, or do students who believe they are receiving relevant support feel more accountable for the collaboration, and thus more motivated to improve their interactions? In this paper, [the authors] describe an adaptive system [they] have developed to support help-giving during peer tutoring in high school algebra: the Adaptive Peer Tutoring Assistant (APTA). To validate [this] approach, [they] conducted a controlled study that demonstrated that [the] system provided students with more relevant support and was more effective at improving student learning than parallel nonadaptive conditions. [The authors'] contributions involve generalizable techniques for implementing ACLS that can function adaptively and effectively, and the finding that adaptive support does indeed improve student learning because of the relevance of the support. (Orig.).