Understanding low outcomes in English language education in Austrian middle schools: the role of teachers’ beliefs and practices

Abstract

The educational disparities that can be found in the English language learning outcomes of middle school students in Austria have gone relatively unexplored in international research. National studies have tended to attribute lower educational outcomes either to students’ socioeconomic status or their multilingual background. In this article, we use the theory of intersectionality to shed new light on how educational disparities that run along socioeconomic lines are tightly entangled with beliefs about students’ multilingualism, arguing that these two factors must be explored in tandem to understand educational disadvantage in this context. Our study brings together a rich description of the educational context with a quantitative exploration via questionnaire of the beliefs and classroom practices of 56 English teachers at Austrian middle schools. Analyses of the data allow insight into how teachers’ beliefs about their students’ abilities, motivations and access to English outside of school and teachers’ language use in the classroom all relate to the lower outcomes in English at Austrian middle schools. The article closes by considering the importance of the findings for policy and practice in English language education in Austria, including ideas for the transformation of these.

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