Page 109 - Getting of the fence

Student motivation in the EFL literature lesson
focuses explicitly on language learning and activities are specifically designed to further this aim” (Paran, 2008, p. 466) could establish a “congruent situation” (Vermunt & Verloop 1999, p. 270) with a high level of agreement and understanding between teacher and students. On the other hand, a foreign language literature lesson with a purely literary goal where “any focus on language is on its literary effects” (Paran, 2008, p. 467) could create undesirable destructive frictions “which may cause a decrease in learning or thinking skills” (Vermunt & Verloop 1999, p. 270). Furthermore, Brown (2009) argues that how students perceive lessons, and to what extent it is similar or disparate to their teachers’, has an impact on student achievement. To summarise, it is important to include students’ perceptions in the current discussions regarding the inclusion of literary texts in the foreign language classroom (See also Chapter 4).
5.2.3 Student engagement as an external manifestation of motivation
Student engagement can be considered as the external “manifestation of a 5 motivated student” (Skinner et al. 2009, p. 494). In this study we follow Skinner’s
motivational conceptualization of behavioural and emotional engagement and
disaffection. Skinner et al. (2009) refers to engagement as “the quality of a student’s
connection or involvement with the endeavour of schooling and hence with the people, activities, goals, values, and place that compose it” (p. 494). According to Skinner, Saxton, Currie, & Shusterman (2017), following this definition, engagement can be understood as an intrinsic motivational factor identified by self-determination theory.
Even though the growing international interest in student engagement has resulted in diverse conceptualizations of the term (Fredricks, McColskey, Meli, Mordica, Montrosse, & Mooney, 2011), most researchers consider engagement as a combination of a number of components, identified as emotional, behavioural, cognitive, and social (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004; Philp & Duchesne, 2016; for alternative interpretations of engagement see for example Zepke, 2011 and Bryson, 2014). The two components most often included in studies of engagement are behavioural and emotional engagement (Lee, 2014), the two components also distinguished in a motivational conceptualization of engagement. (For other combinations of the four components see Lambert, Philp, & Nakamura, 2017; Qiu & Lo, 2017).
One notable feature of a motivational conceptualization of engagement is that participation in the classroom includes both an emotional and a behavioural
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