Conference paper: Vocational students and the English school subject – engaging and disengaging classroom practices

This qualitative study examines how vocational students in Norwegian upper secondary school perceive English as a school subject, with the main aim of presenting their views of engaging and disengaging classroom practices. Academic subjects, like L2 English, have been seen as detrimental to the school experience of vocational students, either by being too theoretical (Dæhlen, 2017), or by hampering students’ perceptions of relevance and meaning in school (Dahlback et al., 2011; Hiim, 2013). Mercer and Dörnyei (2020) propose that to increase students’ engagement for learning, they must be given meaningful opportunities to shape the way they learn. This study is one such contribution, as a mouthpiece for vocational students’ experiences with the English subject. To access vocational students’ views of engaging and disengaging practices, the study compares their experience with English in lower- and upper secondary school. It relies on group interviews with 50 vocational students from 10 classrooms in year 11 and 12 in 10 different schools. The study identifies two main threats to vocational students’ engagement in the English subject: lack of perceived relevance and repetition across school years. It is a clear trend for the students to describe lower secondary English as based on irrelevant and repetitive content, while upper secondary offers more variation. Predictably, the students prefer lessons that are framed as relevant to their lives, including their future careers. Furthermore, they want English lessons to be based on student-active learning forms, preferably organised as groupwork. The students are adamant that they will need English for work and express an interest in being able to perform their regular work tasks in English. Lessons with a vocational orientation thus emerge as promising in these classrooms, being (ideally) neither irrelevant nor repetitive.