Social robots have been introduced in different fields such as retail, health care and education. Primary education in the Netherlands (and elsewhere) recently faced new challenges because of the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns and quarantines including students falling behind and teachers burdened with …

Social robots have been introduced in different fields such as retail, health care and education. Primary education in the Netherlands (and elsewhere) recently faced new challenges because of the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns and quarantines including students falling behind and teachers burdened with …

Even learners with good language ability do not automatically engage in interactional encounters in the foreign language. Affective factors, such as speakers’ willingness to communicate (WTC), self-confidence and enjoyment of oral interaction play an important role in this (e.g. Dewaele & MacIntyre, …

Interaction in the target language (TL) is essential to foreign language development (Swain, 1985, Long, 1981). Meaningful tasks are thought to evoke interaction between learners (e.g. Pica, Kanagy & Falodun, 2009). However, even in a task-based curriculum for German, Dutch secondary school learners …

Over the past year and a half, the pandemic has posed serious challenges to many professions, including education in general and teacher education in particular. COVID19 created an unprecedented and unimagined disruption without preparation. As in schools, in teacher education daily routines were challenged …

In the context of education, ‘presence’—a state of alert awareness, receptivity and connectedness to what is happening in class—is related to depth of insight into the situation, and to more opportunities for action⁠. Presence is mainly conceptualized in philosophical and theoretical terms and idealistic …

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study among 50 secondary school students from 10 schools in the Netherlands, aiming to understand how they experience ‘presence’ – being fully (with one’s entire being) engaged in the here-and-now – in class⁠. Although presence was a non-regular experience, …

Research conducted in former blocks expressed the importance of a sense of belonging on students’ well-being and their academic achievements. With classroom hours often being the single moment of interaction between peers and lecturers, an inadequacy of connectedness within the classroom can cut back …

This study reports on EFL teachers' self-reported teaching practices aimed at stimulating students' language awareness. It investigates whether, and to what extent, awareness-raising practices are currently implemented in EFL secondary education in the Netherlands, how these practices can be characterised, …

This contribution addresses two studies of the processes and outcomes of English as a foreign language (EFL) in Dutch primary education. Firstly, this article describes a preliminary study of the learning outcomes at the end of primary education, comparing pupils’ language proficiency after either two …