Session Information
31 SES 12 A, Research approaches to language performance and affective manifestations among diverse learners
Paper Session
Contribution
Emotional well-being and language performance in multiple languages are both key factors predicting the – lack of – quality and success in adolescents’ lives, now and in their futures. For instance, at all ages, strong emotional well-being may enhance people’s capacity to lead what one considers to be a happy life (Spratt, 2017). General (multi)language skills are, among other advantages, considered a prerequisite for general school success and participation in society, and an important skill to reduce social inequality (Duarte & Gogolin, 2013; Gogolin, McMonagle & Salem, 2019; OECD, 2018). Since especially adolescents struggle with the challenges of exploring possible roles in life and establishing an identity (Wigford, 2020), normally experience emotions more intensely (Langelier & Connell, 2005), and have more psychological problems (Schachner, Van de Vijver, & Noack, 2018) than younger children, both academic as well as emotional motives and goals may change in the transition from childhood to adolescence (Vartanova, 2020). Therefore, in order to promote positive youth development in a diverse society (Rowan et al., 2021) like Europe, understanding the interplay of language outcomes in multiple languages and emotional well-being as risk or protective factors in adolescents’ lives is useful. However, in general, the relationship between emotional well-being and school performance in adolescence is debated and complex (Kaya & Erdem, 2021). On the one hand, overlaps between low academic achievement and low emotional well-being have been established (Pelkonen et al., 2008; Verboom et al., 2005); as have links between high emotional well-being and high academic achievement (Reschley et al., 2008; Jovanović & Gavrilov-Jerković, 2015). On the other hand, negative emotional well-being has also been associated with higher performance due to, for example, increased perfectionism (Giacobello, 2000; Stornelli et al., 2009; Flett et al., 2011). In addition, high performance may reduce and protect against complaints of low mental health (Stewart & Suldo, 2011, p. 1019). In short, due to dynamic developmental pathways and complex contexts, the body of scholarship is far from unified and current evidence for links between emotional well-being and educational outcomes is highly mixed, as well as underlying foundational processes addressed in different studies. In this article, we aim to contribute to understanding these links by narrowing the focus down to language outcomes (in multiple languages) in particular. By conducting a systematic review, the goal of the study is to highlight how emotional well-being and language outcomes in multiple languages may hamper or facilitate each other, by also delving into further protective and risk factors included in the existing studies. The present systematic review aims to answer the following questions: 1) What is known about the nature and direction of the relationship between adolescents’ emotional well-being and their language performance in schooling, heritage and foreign languages? 2) Which foundational processes have been included in studies addressing the relationship between adolescents’ emotional well-being and their language outcomes in schooling, heritage and foreign languages? Compared to outcomes in the majority language, it is expected that the associations between emotional well-being and language performance may be different in contexts of foreign and heritage language performance. For instance, in particular heritage language skills and home language support may increase students´ feeling of empowerment and belonging, relationship skills, and emotional well-being (described in: Cummins & Early, 2011; García & Wei, 2013; Duarte & Günther-van der Meij, 2018; Günther-van der Meij, Duarte, & Nap, 2020). In a foreign language context, happiness and high emotional well-being may boost positive feelings that may help students to flourish in foreign language learning and make linguistic progress, mostly explained by a boost in motivation (Dewaele, Chen, Padilla, & Lake, 2019).
Method
Aiming to be transparent and repeatable (Gough, Oliver & Thomas, 2017), this review was designed and reported in line with the PRISMA 2020 statement (http://prisma-statement.org/documents/PRISMA_2020_checklist.pdf). We included studies 1) targeting teenagers aged 10-19 years old, 2) including at least one language performance measure, 3) including at least one emotional well-being measure meeting the definition as described in §1.1, 4) being peer-reviewed and published, 5) reporting empirical data, and 6) written in English. A very broad definition of language competence was used, including language competence in L2 settings and active as well as passive language competence in all possible subdomains – in order to get an impression of the notion of language investigated in the existing base of studies. No criteria were used for study design methodological and analytical approaches, due to the broad scope of the review and the goal to identify the scope of the relevant literature, rather than draw conclusions about causality and existing evidence (Arksey & O’Malley, 2005, see also van den Berghe et al., 2019). The first author developed a list of search terms and concepts to identify appropriate literature based on a first exploratory search in March 2020. This list was shared with the colleague researchers for feedback and additional suggestions. Then, in February 2021 the first author ran searches for articles from all years available with the search engines ERIC, PsycINFO, and Web of Science. Terminology that captured the concept of emotional well-being included truncated forms of emotion, mood, well-being, life satisfaction, positive affect, negative affect, depression, withdrawal, irritability, resilience, positive psychology, internalizing psychopathology, psychopathology, mental health, happiness, affective condition. These search terms were crossed with truncated variations of the adolescent age group, including adolescents, youth and teenagers, and according school types (e.g. secondary school). With regard to language performance, the search frame further included truncated definitions for achievement, performance, literacy, language, reading, writing, multilingualism, bilingualism, GPA, grades. The studies were selected and screened in steps. After retrieving the studies from the search engines, duplicates and abstracts irrelevant based on the title were removed. The remaining abstracts were imported into the ASreview active learning programme for systematic reviews (van de Schoot et al., 2021). Also, an additional search in reference lists and Google Scholar’s “cited by” function was conducted. The final data set consisted of 41 studies.
Expected Outcomes
Study sample sizes ranged from 69 to 12.358 students, had an average of 1.494,9 students. Studies were mostly found in Northern Europe and Northern America. Ages in the studies ranged from ten to 19, with 12.4 (SD = 1.8) as mean minimum age and 15.5 (SD = 1.8) as mean maximum age. One of the goals of the research question was to address the chicken-egg causality dilemma in the association between emotional well-being and language performance. Although our study design does not allow conclusions about causal relationships, we can report the directions and foundational assumptions considered in the included set of studies. Remarkably, without clear dominance of each of the directions, all directions were found. Sixteen studies (39.0%) examined whether and how language competence may lead to changes in emotional well-being, fifteen (36.6%) studies asked the conversed question investigating how and to what extent emotional well-being influences language competence, and the final ten studies (24.4%) examined reciprocal directions or did not specify a direction. The mixed findings in the general relationship between performance and emotional well-being was confirmed. For example, two studies with rather larger samples (n = 1874 and n = 2018 respectively) did not find an effect of depressive symptoms on self-reported majority language school scores or its growth (Park et al., 2019), nor of self-reported majority school performance on depressive symptoms (Zhou et al., 2018). Other studies did find significant relationships, both positive and negative ones. The analysis for this study is work in progress. Some preliminary tendencies can be listed: - Some studies grouped students according to their ability level and found that low language levels may predict lower emtional well-being. - The relationship between emotional well-being and performance in different languages may depend on specific characteristics of students' migration backgrounds such as parental language use. - Age may play a role.
References
Dewaele, J. M., Chen, X., Padilla, A. M., & Lake, J. (2019). The flowering of positive psychology in foreign language teaching and acquisition research. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2128. Duarte, J., & Gogolin, I. (Eds.). (2013). Linguistic superdiversity in urban areas: Research approaches (Vol. 2). John Benjamins Publishing. García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging and education. In Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education (pp. 63-77). London: Palgrave Pivot. Gogolin, I., McMonagle, S., & Salem, T. (2019). Germany: Systemic, sociocultural and linguistic perspectives on educational inequality. In: P. Stevens and A. Dworkin (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of race and ethnic inequalities in education (pp. 557-602). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Gough, D., Oliver, S., & Thomas, J. (Eds.). (2017). An introduction to systematic reviews. Sage. Günther-van der Meij, M., Duarte, J., & Nap, L. (2020). Including multiple languages in secondary education: A translanguaging approach. European Journal of Applied Linguistics, 8, 73-106. Kaya, M., & Erdem, C. (2021). Students’ Well-Being and Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analysis Study. Child Indicators Research, 1-25. Rowan, L., Bourke, T., L’Estrange, L., Lunn Brownlee, J., Ryan, M., Walker, S., & Churchward, P. (2021). How does initial teacher education research frame the challenge of preparing future teachers for student diversity in schools? A systematic review of literature. Review of Educational Research, 91(1), 112-158. Park, Y., Seo, D. G., Park, J., Kim, B., & Choi, J. (2019). The influence of behavioral and emotional characteristics on academic achievement of middle school students: A growth modeling approach. School Psychology International, 40(5), 433-455. Schachner, M. K., Van de Vijver, F. J., & Noack, P. (2018). Acculturation and school adjustment of early-adolescent immigrant boys and girls in Germany: Conditions in school, family, and ethnic group. The Journal of Early Adolescence, 38, 352-384. Spratt, J. (2017). Wellbeing equity and education. A critical analysis of policy discourses of wellbeing in schools: Inclusive learning and educational equity, 1. Vartanova, I. I. (2020). Emotional Attitude to School and Self-Attitude in High School Students of Different Sex and Age. Psychological Science and Education, 25, 40-48. Verboom, C. E., Sijtsema, J. J., Verhulst, F. C., Penninx, B. W., & Ormel, J. (2014). Longitudinal associations between depressive problems, academic performance, and social functioning in adolescent boys and girls. Developmental Psychology, 50, 247-257. Zhou, Q., Fan, L., & Yin, Z. (2018). Association between family socioeconomic status and depressive symptoms among Chinese adolescents: Evidence from a national household survey. Psychiatry research, 259, 81-88.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.