Differences in English teachers’ beliefs and practices and inequity in Austrian English language education: could plurilingual pedagogies help close the gap?

ABSTRACT

Educational research in Austria has demonstrated that early tracking into academic secondary schools and middle schools results in inequities for students with low socioeconomic status, from migration backgrounds and/or with German as an additional language. It has also found gaps in performance between students in the two school types, including in English. To better understand the reasons for this, we collected data from teachers in both school types about their beliefs and classroom practices. Teachers in academic secondary schools indicate higher achievement levels for English amongst their students compared to teachers in middle schools. Descriptive and inferential analyses reveal higher perceived levels of motivation amongst academic secondary school compared to middle school students, and students’ perceived level of motivation influenced English language outcomes in both school types. Moreover, there were significant differences aligning with school type in teachers’ reported language use in the classroom and their perceptions of students’ access to English outside of school. These findings suggest factors that contribute to gaps in achievement in English language education according to school type. The article closes by considering how plurilingual pedagogies might be employed to transform beliefs, alleviate disadvantage and support equity in English language education in Austria and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• Equity
• tracking
• English language education
• socioeconomic status
• plurilingual pedagogies
• Austria

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the teachers who participated in the research, the University of Graz for financially supporting this research, and Karen Littleton, Emilee Moore, Sandra Radinger and our two supportive reviewers for helping to shape our ideas.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The variable of socioeconomic status is an indexical measure derived from parents’ educational and professional status and the reported number of educational resources like books at home (BIFIE, 2020).