New in EJELR: Motivation, Migration, and the Ecology of Language Learning

I am pleased to share that a new article has been accepted for publication and will soon appear in the European Journal of Education and Language Review (EJELR), co-authored by Konstantina Rizou and myself.¹ The article, titled “Motivational dynamics in refugee and migrant language education: An ecological perspective on teacher perceptions”, grew out of Katerina’s dissertation at the MA in Language Education for Refugees and Migrants (LRM), a research project on the language learning motivation of refugees and migrants that I was proud to supervise. What it offers, I think, is a genuinely useful perspective for both researchers and practitioners working in this field.

What the article is about

The article takes up the question of language learning motivation among refugees and migrants in Greece, or rather their teachers’ perceptions of this motivation — a topic that is both practically urgent and theoretically interesting. One of the strengths of the paper is a robust review of the motivation literature, from which Konstantina advances a conceptualisation of motivation as something that emerges² from the interplay of individual dispositions, relationships within the learning environment, and broader societal structures.

The empirical work draws on semi-structured interviews with six teachers who have worked with refugee and migrant learners in a range of settings, from mainstream secondary schools to NGO-run programmes. The choice to work with teachers rather than learners directly was a pragmatic and ethical compromise. Direct access to refugees and migrants presented significant methodological and welfare challenges, and the article is transparent about the limitations this introduces. But while this choice was a compromise, it actually produced some important insights, which I discuss below.

Analytically, the study is informed by Intentional Dynamics Theory (Stelma & Kostoulas, 2021),³ a framework that brings together complex dynamic systems thinking and ecological perspectives on human activity. This allowed us to describe motivation not as a binary presence or absence, but as a configuration of affordances and constraints operating at multiple, interconnected levels: the learner’s own background and aspirations, the dynamics of the classroom and institution, and the wider policy and societal context.

What the study found

The study’s findings are organised into a system of motivation, with three levels embedded within one another: the intrapersonal, the immediate learning environment, and the broader societal context. Across all three, the picture that emerges is one of hierarchies of constraints.

Intrapersonal constraints

At the intrapersonal level, teachers identified a range of motivational affordances: the desire to integrate, to meet immediate survival needs, to access employment, and to renew residence permits. These are real and consequential drivers. But what is equally striking is how the teachers framed learners’ backgrounds and capabilities. Several participants described refugees and migrants in terms that attributed motivational difficulty to individual or cultural deficits: an inability to adapt, an unfamiliarity with schooling, or a limited commitment to learning for its own sake. This is strong evidence of a pedagogical ideology circulating among teachers that itself functions as a constraint within the ecology.

Learning environment constraints

At the level of the learning environment, teacher-learner relationships emerged as a strong motivational force, as did contextualised and responsive teaching materials. By contrast, the teachers described standardised curricula and high-stakes testing as recurring sources of demotivation. Their mismatch with learners’ real communicative needs appeared vividly in one teacher’s account of an examination question asking learners to name ten Greek cities beginning with the letter beta.⁴

Societal constraints

At the broader societal level, the findings document a set of structural constraints that are quite familiar but rarely described with such theoretical precision: precarious living and working conditions, bureaucratic complexity, poor coordination across state, municipal and NGO provision, and forced relocations that disrupt continuity of learning.

Theoretical integration

What the Intentional Dynamics framework adds to this description is analytical purchase. Deficit ideology, as the article argues, is not simply a regrettable attitude of individual teachers; it functions as a form of normative structure within the motivational ecology. When such perceptions are widespread, they sediment into institutional expectations and curricular practices, and they constrain the affordances available to learners at multiple levels simultaneously.

Deficit thinking, in this reading, is part of the ecology, and one of the mechanisms that reproduce normative dynamics. This is, I think, one of the more theoretically productive moves the article makes, and it has direct implications for the design of professional development for teachers working with minoritised and vulnerable populations.

The overall picture is of a motivational ecology dominated by normative dynamics — one that is resistant to change precisely because the constraints are so deeply distributed across levels. But the ecological perspective also keeps open the possibility of restructuring: in less formally constrained settings, such as NGO-run programmes, there was evidence of more contingent and creative dynamics at work.

Why it matters:
implications for research and practice

The implications of the study reach, I think, in several directions at once.

For language education policy

The theoretical framing of the study is useful here precisely because it resists locating the problem in any single level of the system. The barriers to motivation are distributed across bureaucratic structures, housing policy, employment conditions, and the coordination failures of multiple agencies. What this suggests is that interventions addressing only one level are unlikely to be sufficient.

For language teaching and learning

The data point clearly points towards what an affordance-rich pedagogy looks like in this context. It would involve materials that reflect learners’ actual communicative priorities, tasks with authentic interactional value, and space for teacher and learner agency in curriculum design. The corollary is equally clear: where formal curricula and examination requirements dominate, they tend to crowd out the conditions that sustain motivation. This, of course, also raises the question of what the teachers’ role might be in selecting or producing such materials, and whether constant complaints about available resources are the most productive way forward.

For teacher education

This is where the ecological framing sharpens the practical implications most. Treating deficit ideology as a structural feature of the ecology — rather than a personal failing of individual teachers — shifts the design question for professional development. The goal is not to correct attitudes in isolation, but to create conditions in which teachers can examine how deficit assumptions propagate in institutional practices and curricular expectations. This awareness is the first step towards developing the tools to work against such attitudes.

For language education theory

For theory, the study extends the application of Intentional Dynamics Theory beyond its original focus on classroom interaction into the domain of language learning psychology. This is part of a larger research project that I have been developing with my LRM students for some time now. Earlier work (Taxiarchou, 2022; Palavouzi, 2023) has explored related ground, and this article adds to that body of evidence for the framework’s versatility as a metatheoretical lens.

One of the things I find most useful about the ecological approach is that it resists both extreme determinism and epistemic voluntarism. The epistemological frame we’ve been developing (Stelma and I, and now my students and I) t can account for the real weight of structural constraints without losing sight of the genuine (if bounded) possibilities for creative restructuring. In contexts where normative pressure is strong —and education in Greece is one such context— identifying those spaces of contingency and creative dynamics matters, both theoretically and practically.

For future research

For future research, the study is explicitly hypothesis-building rather than conclusive. The small sample, the Athens-centred geography, and the mediated access to learner perspectives all counsel caution about generalisation. What the study does is sketch a model of motivation as an emergent, stratified, ecologically situated process that future work can refine, challenge, and extend, ideally with more direct participation from refugee and migrant learners themselves, and in a wider range of contexts.

If you would like to explore these questions further, perhaps we could get in touch and discuss whether our LRM programme is a good fit for your professional development needs. Feel free to use the ‘connect’ button above to reach out.

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The full article is published in the European Journal of Education and Language Review and is available through the journal’s website. I hope it will be of interest to colleagues working at the intersections of language education, migration, and educational psychology — and of practical use to teachers navigating some very demanding professional terrain.

Footnotes

1. Yes, there is more than a little tension in publishing your work in the journal you edit. The truth is that Konstantina and I could have published the paper elsewhere, but I felt that it would look equally awkward if I asked other people to support a new journal, and at the same time, treated the journal as if it were not good enough for my own work. What we (the editors) did do, however, is treat this submission with the same rigour we would apply anywhere else: the manuscript went through double-blind peer review organised by my co-editor, the reviewers’ comments were substantive, and the revisions we made in response were not trivial. Whether that is sufficient to resolve the tension, I leave to the reader’s judgment. ↩︎
2. The notion of emergence is central to Complex Dynamic Systems Theory, which I often use as a meta-theoretical frame to describe aspects of language education. ↩︎
3. Stelma, J. & Kostoulas, A. (2021). The intentional dynamics of TESOL. De Gruyter. I still think this is the most important work of theory I have written. ↩︎
4. For the record, I can name three. ↩︎

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