Education and visiting researcher in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on multilingual and multimodal practices in community arts and her doctoral research traces the trajectory of a text as it is developed into a street arts production. She has interests in coproduction and collaboration with artists and creative practitioners in the field of language and communication research. She has project managed and researched multiple arts-based co-produced projects including with refugees in West Yorkshire.
This study explored the affective factors influencing students’ learning of Catalan across different year levels in a multilingual school community in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain). Questionnaires were distributed to 176 students, from 12 to 17 years of age, registered in a public secondary school, the majority of whom were not born in Catalonia. This study is unique for two reasons. First, many of the students were simultaneously learning 2 official languages—Catalan and Spanish—both inside and outside the classroom, plus 1 foreign language, English. Second, the instrument used to assess the affective variables made use of scales from 2 different models, by Dörnyei (2001) and Gardner (1985). There were 4 major results. First, it was found that the students used Catalan very infrequently in comparison to Spanish even though Catalan is an official language and is the language of the school. Second, the students’ country of origin had relatively little influence on most of the affective measures. Third, attitudes and motivation decreased and language anxiety increased as year level increased. Finally, the constructs assessed by the scales in the 2 models (i.e., Dörnyei, 2001; Gardner, 1985) are largely factorially distinct, tapping different affective dimensions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.