Sarah M. Eiene is a PhD candidate and project coordinator at the Department of School Research and Teacher Education at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is part of a large-scale international research project LANGUAGES, which is a collaboration between researchers from England, France and Norway, and which aims to advance our understanding of what characterises helpful and challenging language instruction in English and French across these three countries.
During her master’s thesis, Sarah explored the underlying factors of Norwegian university students’ willingness to speak French in different learning contexts. In her PhD, she continues this line of inquiry. Here, she investigates lower secondary student’s opportunities to talk, as well as students’ perspectives on such talk. Drawing benefit of LANGUAGES’ design, she explores this topic through mixed methods, integrating qualitative and quantitative analyses of video recordings from 86 classrooms in English and French lessons across England, France and Norway, as well as interviews with students from these contexts.
Her wish as is that this research will draw attention to student talk in the language classroom across national, social and disciplinary contexts.