Applied Linguistics 2021: 1–5

doi:10.1093/applin/amab014

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Phil Hiver, Ali H. Al-Hoorie, and Sarah Mercer (Eds): Student
Engagement in the Language Classroom. Multilingual Matters, 2021

Student engagement, while being a long-standing, established construct in

educational psychology, has only recently gained the spotlight in the domain
of applied linguistics. The field’s understanding of engagement is still at an em-
bryonic stage despite the consensus of its essential role in learning process and
achievement. This edited volume renders itself an important and timely con-
tribution as it fruitfully demystifies engagement, the complex construct or
meta-construct through comprehensively delving into the conceptualizations
and operationalizations of engagement and exemplifying empirical research in
the field of second language acquisition (SLA).
This book starts with an introduction by the editors, and is organized into
two parts consisting of four conceptual chapters and nine empirical chapters,
respectively, as well as a concluding chapter. Part 1 commences with Sang and
Hiver’s chapter that offers definitions of engagement and elucidates the be-
havioural, cognitive, affective, and social dimensions of engagement and task
engagement. The authors then compare the commonalities and uniquenesses
of engagement with companion constructs including motivation, investment,
and interest. They clarify that engagement is action, while motivation reflects
intention or desire before action. Investment is the sociological equivalent of
motivation, which hinges on the roles of power relations and learners’ social
identities in L2 learning. In comparison, interest is more tied to specific targets
such as a task or a topic. These are important conceptual understandings that
lay down the foundation for entangling engagement from the broader spec-
trum of psychological and social factors commonly investigated in applied lin-
guistics. This chapter ends with the authors’ proposal for a research agenda for
L2 engagement.
In Chapter 3, Svalberg focuses on engagement with language (EWL), a
domain-specific construct that highlights the learner being the agent and lan-
guage being the object talked about in the learning process. She illustrates the
use of language-related episodes (LREs) as manifestation of EWL based on an
analytic framework for identifying what she proposed as the three dimensions
of EWL: cognitive, affective, and social. Arguing that neither presentation–
practice–production nor focus-on-form is sufficient to trigger elaborate EWL,
Svalberg provides an insightful solution (a task package) that entails the com-
bination of consciousness-raising task, confirmation (from the teacher), and
communicative task.
In Chapter 4, Han and Gao first critically review learner engagement with
written corrective feedback (WCF) explored in prior studies informed by L2
writing research, instructed SLA research, and educational research.
Referencing Fredricks et al.’s (2004) three facets of engagement (cognitive, be-
havioural, and affective), they argue for including metacognitive processes in
C The Author(s) (2021). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
V
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the cognitive dimension of engagement. They then summarize five major stu-
dent profiles in response to written feedback, and learner-related and context-
ual factors that mediate learner engagement with WCF. The authors finally
present rigorous interrogation of issues pervasive in the status quo of engage-
ment research, especially underscoring the need for explanatory research to
probe into the mechanism of engagement rather than repeatedly describe its
complexity and dynamicity.
Chapter 5 by Zhou, Hiver, and Al-Hoorie distinctly tackles the issues of
researching engagement. They present four trends of eliciting data and the
strengths and limitations of each: surveys and questionnaires, observations
and expert ratings, interviews, and real-time sampling methods. This is fol-
lowed by a critical and systematic review of various measurements of each di-
mension of engagement: cognitive (e.g. private speech, LREs), behavioural
(e.g. time on task, word counts), emotional (e.g. laugh episodes, questionnaire
ratings), and social (e.g. backchannels, empathetic expressions). Regarding fu-
ture directions, the authors particularly foresee the value of indirect measures
of engagement using technological platforms (e.g. EdX, social media) and neu-
roscientific techniques. This chapter is an informative, handy reference guide
for data elicitation in engagement research.
Part 2 comprises a collection of empirical studies on engagement in different
contexts and modes. Sulis and Philp (Chapter 6) investigate French L2 stu-
dents’ perceptions of classroom environment (challenges and support) in rela-
tion to engagement in a British university through classroom observations,
video/audio recordings, and interviews. The results show that peer group,
teacher, and tasks are the three macro-themes accounting for the impact of
environment on engagement. In Carver, Jung, and Gurzynski-Weiss’s
(Chapter 7) study, face-to-face (FTF) settings were found to engender higher
degrees of cognitive and affective engagement among 16 Spanish L2 learners
completing information-gap tasks than did synchronous computer-mediated
communication (SCMC) settings; only affective engagement in FTF predicted
the learning of copula. In contrast, Mills (Chapter 11) showcases how the im-
mersive technology known as virtual reality (VR) employed in a Paris
Narrative project was tailored to enhancing learners’ cognitive, behavioural,
emotional, and social engagement through a four-stage course design
(pre-viewing, immersive viewing, focused viewing, and synthesis). In contexts
beyond classrooms, Wang and Mercer (Chapter 14) explore how actual en-
gagement is influenced by willingness to engage (WTE), an emergent state
defined as ‘a readiness to engage with the target language and language learn-
ing opportunities’ (p. 268), which has its source in the notion of willingness to
communicate (WTC) proposed by MacIntyre et al. (1998). Adopting a collab-
orative autoethnographic approach with the first author Wang (a beginning
learner of L2 German) as the participant, they report that WTE as an import-
ant antecedent of engagement is contingent on individual, social, and context-
ual factors.
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Several studies appear to place their lens on social relations. Mercer, Talbot,
and Wang’s study (Chapter 8) investigates how learners may pretend to be
engaged and the motives for doing so. They report that bodily display behav-
iours (e.g. head movement, posture) and work-related actions (e.g. note-
taking, reading) may be employed to fake engagement to comply with social
norms or please the teacher. Their findings caution against relying on observa-
tional data for researching engagement. Phung, Nakamura, and Reinders
(Chapter 9) examine the effect of choice on affective engagement indexed by
enjoyment, anxiety, perception of focus, and freedom of expression. Learners
who were free to propose their options in decision-making tasks were found
to exhibit significantly higher degrees of affective engagement. Interestingly,
anxiety did not hinder affective engagement, a finding consistent with the
comments in Han and Gao’s chapter. In Chapter 10 by Fukuda, Fukada,
Falout, and Murphey, a novel type of engagement, prosocial peer learning
support (PPLS) is explored based on the coding of students’ responses to an
open-ended question regarding their perceptions of peers’ support for their
English learning. The treatment of priming students to reflect on ideal class-
mates was found to promote PPLS engagement by means of creating a friendly
atmosphere that promotes each other’s English communication.
Of the remaining two studies, Oga-Baldwin and Fryer’s (Chapter 12) longi-
tudinal study using latent growth curve models reveals that elementary school
students in Japan exhibited significant growth in cognitive engagement over
2 years, and female students showed stronger growth in behavioural engage-
ment than male students. Khajavy (Chapter 13) employs path analysis to
examine among Iranian students the relations of grit (including perseverance
and interest), emotions, and engagement, with L2 reading comprehension
being the criterion measure. This study shows that the two components of grit
and enjoyment were predictive of L2 engagement; perseverance, anxiety, and
L2 engagement were significant predictors of L2 reading comprehension.
This book is a substantial contribution to L2 learner engagement research,
from which some important take-home messages may be summarized. First,
the quality rather than quantity of engagement matters more particularly
since engagement can be diversely faked. In addition, cliché-like, descriptive
findings on engagement, as Han and Gao rightfully note, are not helpful for
pushing the research boundaries further. The role of technology-assisted in-
struction (e.g. VR projects) or SCMC settings in student engagement is a
promising research avenue. This volume has also left two issues for future
considerations. While the notion of WTE captures the dynamic antecedent
state of actual engagement, any psychometric measure of WTE would need to
avoid overlap in content with the existing scales that measure engagement
proper (e.g. see Chapters 5, 12, and 13). Further evidence is also needed to as-
certain the role of SCMC in L2 learning and use, given that SCMC was found
to generate lower degrees of learner engagement than FTF whereas digital set-
tings were recently reported to enhance learners’ L2 WTC (e.g. Lee and Hsieh
2019). Overall, this volume maps out the research landscape of L2 learners’
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engagement through clarifying its conceptual underpinnings and operational
measures, and demonstrating sophisticated research designs that bridge theory
and practice. It will be of great interest to researchers in learner psychology
and SLA, graduate students, and language teachers.

FUNDING
This work was supported by China National Social Science Fund [grant number
19BYY197].

Reviewed by Jian-E Peng and Yuanlan Jiang

College of Liberal Arts, Shantou University, Shantou, China
E-mail: [email protected]
doi:10.1093/applin/amab014

REFERENCES
Fredricks, J. A., P. C. Blumenfeld, and A. H. learners in in-class, out-of-class, and digital con-
Paris. 2004. ‘School engagement: Potential of texts,’ System 82: 63–73.
the concept, state of the evidence,’ Review of MacIntyre, P. D., Z. Dörnyei, R. Clément, and
Educational Research 74: 59–109. K. A. Noels. 1998. ‘Conceptualizing willing-
Lee, J. S. and J. C. Hsieh. 2019. ‘Affective varia- ness to communicate in a L2: A situational
bles and willingness to communicate of EFL model of L2 confidence and affiliation,’ The
Modern Language Journal 82: 545–62.
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR
Jian-E Peng is a professor in the College of Liberal Arts, Shantou University, China. She
holds a PhD from the University of Sydney. Her research interests include learner mo-
tivation, English academic writing, discourse analysis, and teacher development. Her
works include a book published by Multilingual Matters, three book chapters, and
papers published in Language Learning, TESOL Quarterly, System, Journal of English for
Academic Purposes, ELT Journal, Linguistics and Education, Asia-Pacific Education Researcher,
and Sage Open. Address for correspondence: Jian-E Peng, 243 Daxue Road, Shantou,
Guangdong, China. <[email protected]>

Yuanlan Jiang is a postgraduate student in the College of Liberal Arts, Shantou

University, China. Her research interests include learner motivation, discourse analysis,
and second language acquisition.