IPPE Brown Bag | Dr Abigail Parrish | University of Sheffield

A decade ago, as a new PhD student and newly-ex classroom languages teacher, I was looking for a way to study student motivation. As in Australia, language learning in the UK has been in long-term decline, and I wanted to understand more about why this was the case. After the usual process of trial and error, I came across SDT and found it to be a perfect fit for the context I was studying. In this talk, I will draw on several of my studies to discuss how SDT allows us to study student motivation at the intersection of education policy, school performance measurement and classroom practice. Using English schools as a case study, I will explore both similarities and differences in students’ motivation for language learning when compared to other subjects and explore how policy and practice can impact on students in this specific context, and how this might be reflected through and SDT lens.