Veranstaltungsprogramm

Multilingualism manifests itself at various levels in Switzerland. The official languages of Switzerland – German, French, Italian and Romansh – are enshrined in the Swiss Federal Constitution (Art. 4) and are institutionally promoted (Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation, 1999), whereby Romansh and Italian are considered minority languages. The dialectal varieties of Swiss German and Romansh as well as Français de Suisse, italiano regionale and migrant languages also enrich the spectrum of multilingualism in Switzerland (Author, 2024).

Many children and young people grow up multilingually and are exposed to the language varieties, and at the same time, various family languages, including migrant languages. In addition, young people of Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012) and Alpha (born from 2010 onwards) have grown up in the world of modern information technologies and social media, which is predominantly multilingual. Consequently, young people can be considered as linguistic (Stroud, 2018) and digital citizens (Richardson & Milovidov, 2019) who are able to engage with language and digitization actively and in a socially responsible manner in local and global contexts and can “use language as a ’power tool’ to create a peaceful, just and ecologically sustainable world” (UNESCO, 2017, p. 162).

This case study is embedded in the new Horizont research project, MultiLX - Strategies to strengthen European linguistic capital in a globalised world (2025-2028), which examines language policy and practice in digital, multilingual Europe. The project brings together scholars in nine universities, across eight countries, to ask how inclusive policy can be developed and implemented to support all the languages of Europe.

In the Swiss case study, we explore the multimodal, multilingual and digital linguistic practices of young people in a range of different life contexts including social media, school and home. By doing so, the project explicates the overt and covert language policies reflected in practices, beliefs and management at both the family and school levels (Spolsky, 2004).

The investigation is led by the following research questions: How do young people use multilingual and multimodal semiotic resources in digital and physical spaces? How do young people value multilingualism and negotiate their multilingual identities in different spaces and contexts?

To address these research questions, a linguistic ethnographic study will be conducted. Thereby, we will combine quantitative and qualitative approaches. The quantitative approach will include a questionnaire, which will be developed for young people in four different cantons of Switzerland (N=1000 or more). It will explore young people’s family language policies that reflect in practices, beliefs and management at the family level.

The qualitative approach will encompass participatory observation, ethnographic interviews and visual ethnography. We will focus on 12 key participants (4 in each language region in the German, French, Italian and Romansh-speaking parts of Switzerland) in two different contexts: in school and at home. In the respective school, the researchers will investigate the schools’ language policy (practices, beliefs, and management) and observe the participants’ online and offline linguistic practices and collect empirical data by writing ethnographic protocols and conducting short ethnographic interviews with the students and the teachers. In the family context the researchers will collect multimodal ethnographic data, such as mediagram (Lexander & Androutspoulos, 2023), photographs about linguistic landscapes in private spaces (books, posters or screenshots of digital communication), videos about gaming and audios about language practices, in collaboration with the participants as co-researchers throughout one year.

The preliminary results of the quantitative study will be available at the time of the conference.

Theoretical Background

Recent large-scale attainment studies have demonstrated that schools often struggle to handle heterogeneity among students effectively (OECD, 2023). Therefore, supporting students in their individual learning processes is key to fostering their educational achievement. A prominent approach that explicitly addresses students’ heterogeneity is adaptive teaching (Corno, 2008). Adaptive teaching systematically combines formative assessment, differentiation (macro adaptation), and individual support (micro adaptation) to enhance students’ meaningful and lasting learning. In this context, educational technologies can be promising tools to facilitate the process of adaptive teaching.

Previous research has primarily focused on advanced and fully automated technologies, such as intelligent tutoring systems (Keuning & van Geel, 2021). These sophisticated approaches generally involved single interventions covering a limited set of topics in specific subjects, which makes it difficult to generalize the findings across different subjects and contexts in which such technology is not available and teachers have to use available technologies to realize adaptive teaching (Sibley et al., 2024).

Research Question

In the current study, we therefore aimed to address this gap by investigating a) the immediate and long-term effects of technology-enhanced adaptive teaching compared to regular teaching on students’ cognitive (knowledge outcome), metacognitive (monitoring accuracy), and motivational (interest, self-efficacy) outcomes and b) whether the obtained effects depend on specific boundary conditions such as students’ prerequisites (prior knowledge) and class-level conditions (domain, implementation fidelity). The generalizability of adaptive teaching was tested in different educational settings across various subjects (k = 12 teaching units, e.g., Mathematics, ethics) and grades (7-12).

Design and Method

In total, 656 school students participated in the study (M = 14.91 years, SD = 2.03; 45 % female). This sample exceeded the size needed to ensure 80 %, as calculated by an a-priori power analysis.

As we implemented the adaptive teaching units in authentic classroom setting for 3-4 weeks, we applied a quasi-experimental approach with two conditions: technology-enhanced adaptive teaching versus regular teaching. We used a pre-post-delayed-test design to examine students’ prior, immediate, and lasting learning (four-week delay) outcomes and to test our pre-registered hypothesis (technology-based adaptive teaching > regular teaching).

We applied multiple imputation with 50 imputed datasets and 50 iterations to deal with missing values and performed cluster-robust estimation of fixed effect models, accounting for the correlated error terms within a cluster (students nested within classes nested within cohorts) but independent error terms across clusters.

Results

Technology-based adaptive teaching did not lead to higher performances than regular teaching regarding the immediate posttest (p = .069), however, in the delayed posttest it did (p = .003, small effect). Regarding monitoring accuracy, interest, and self-efficacy, none of the results were significant.

Interestingly, additional moderator analyses revealed that domain moderated the effect: adaptive teaching was more effective than the control group in languages (posttest: p = .001, small effect; delayed: p < .001, medium effect). Similarly, implementation fidelity (number of adaptive elements within a unit) moderated the effect: teaching with few adaptive elements resulted in no differences among conditions, but teaching with many adaptive elements demonstrated a significant benefit compared to the control condition regarding learning (posttest: p = .004, small effect; delayed: p = .001, small effect). Similarly, students in highly adaptive teaching units showed higher self-efficacy compared to students in the control condition in the immediate posttest (p = .014, small effect). There were no other significant effects.

By demonstrating significant improvements in lasting learning, particularly in language subjects, our findings highlight the transformative potential of adaptive teaching in contemporary educational contexts. Moving forward, research and innovation in adaptive teaching practices are crucial to advancing educational equity across subjects and fostering meaningful learning for all students.