Task engagement in virtual pedagogical lingua franca communication

Abstract

Engagement has become a key issue in educational research and literature. Over the last decades, several attempts have been made to develop theoretical models that help researchers and teachers to better understand task engagement and what it means for learning. However, to improve everyday research and teaching, we need more information on how students engage with their tasks in authentic contemporary educational settings.

Against this background, this PhD study offers theoretical and empirical insights in secondary school students’ task engagement in virtual pedagogical lingua franca (PLF) communication. More specifically, it offers a window on how English language learning students carry out tasks and make them their own when communicating and collaborating with peers from other countries while using English as a pedagogical lingua franca during intercultural virtual exchange. In particular, the study introduces a two-layered approach that researchers can use to study task engagement in a more differentiated way. Furthermore, it provides foreign language teachers with insights on how to design and implement pedagogical interventions that potentially strengthen their students’ task engagement in virtual PLF communication. The results of the study show that virtual PLF communication offers a promising playground for putting the key principles of communicative language teaching into practice and, as such, promotes the kind of naturalistic interaction that is beneficial for L2 development and intercultural learning.

The study is of interest to a broad range of educational professionals including researchers aiming to understand task engagement in an authentic contemporary language learning context, foreign language teachers looking for ways to pedagogically mentor their students towards desirable patterns of task engagement and ownership, as well as international officers and educational managers wishing to explore the possibilities of blended language learning.