Student Engagement in the Language Classroom

Student engagement, while being a long-standing, established construct in educational psychology, has only recently gained the spotlight in the domain of applied linguistics. The field’s understanding of engagement is still at an embryonic stage despite the consensus of its essential role in learning process and achievement. This edited volume renders itself an important and timely contribution as it fruitfully demystifies engagement, the complex construct or meta-construct through comprehensively delving into the conceptualizations and operationalizations of engagement and exemplifying empirical research in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). This book starts with an introduction by the editors, and is organized into two parts consisting of four conceptual chapters and nine empirical chapters, respectively, as well as a concluding chapter. Part 1 commences with Sang and Hiver’s chapter that offers definitions of engagement and elucidates the behavioural, cognitive, affective, and social dimensions of engagement and task engagement. The authors then compare the commonalities and uniquenesses of engagement with companion constructs including motivation, investment, and interest. They clarify that engagement is action, while motivation reflects intention or desire before action. Investment is the sociological equivalent of motivation, which hinges on the roles of power relations and learners’ social identities in L2 learning. In comparison, interest is more tied to specific targets such as a task or a topic. These are important conceptual understandings that lay down the foundation for entangling engagement from the broader spectrum of psychological and social factors commonly investigated in applied linguistics. This chapter ends with the authors’ proposal for a research agenda for L2 engagement.