What Are the Best Practices to Foster Students’ Motivation in Multilingual Schools? The Teachers’ Perspective

Abstract

This contribution focuses on teachers’ perspectives on ways of motivating students in multilingual education settings where a local minority language co-exists with a State majority language, English as a lingua franca and additional immigrant languages. The findings we will be reporting on are from a study that was carried out in the two regions of the Basque Autonomous Community in Spain and of the Autonomous Region Friuli Venezia Giulia in Italy. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 42 primary and secondary school teachers from both contexts, and data were analysed by means of content analysis following Dörnyei’s (2001) and Henry et al.’s (2018) taxonomies. Motivational activities described by teachers were categorised based on the language/s in which they were carried out. Empirically supporting Dörnyei’s and Henry et al.’s proposals, findings show that activities with authentic and teacher-created materials are prevalent, whatever the language, while textbooks appear to be almost never used. Designing activities that involve the use of authentic materials requires that teachers possess solid pedagogical and linguistic skills, a circumstance which makes the development of language awareness and motivational skills a priority in teacher education and professional development courses. Based on such findings, implications for future research are discussed.