What do pupils learn from bilingual interventions of civic education in foreign language classes?

ABSTRACT

What do pupils learn from bilingual interventions of civic education? This paper addresses this question by analyzing survey responses of 301 pupils who participated in a bilingual role-play about a televised debate on the 2022 French presidential election in French foreign language classes. The study shows, first, that the intervention significantly strenghtened the specific interest in the election campaign. Second, both internal efficacy and subjective knowledge increased, as did, third, pupils' actual knowledge about the election. Fourth, it appears that the pupils were able to sharpen their understanding of French political culture. However, it should also be noted that all other constructs that can be attributed to intercultural learning did not experience any changes as a result of participation in the intervention. This is also true for participants’ general interest in politics, basal and advanced participation intentions, and external efficacy. I identify subjective knowledge about the French presidential election, internal efficacy, advanced participation intentions, and pupils’ cultural self-reflexivity as key drivers for strengthening intercultural understanding about the French political culture. Our paper concludes by discussing the limitations of the study and its implications for empirical research and practice in bilingual civic education.

KEYWORDS:

• French presidential election
• bilingual civic education
• interdisciplinary civic education
• intercultural competence
• intervention study

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 To the best of the author’s knowledge, there is no established body of international quantitative-empirical research on the effect of civic education interventions on pupils’ political dispositions, which is why in the following mainly the (few) works from the German context are referred to, also because it is the reference point of the intervention examined in this study.

2 To the best of the author’s knowledge, no corpus of empirical work exists on the effects of bilingual interventions of civic education on intercultural competence.

3 We thank the unknown reviewer(s) for bringing up this thought.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Waldvogel

Thomas Waldvogel is a research associate at the department of political science (Albert-Ludiwgs-University, Freiburg, Germany) and educational consultant at the state agency of civic education Baden-Württemberg.