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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.
Sec. Language, Culture and Diversity
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1520944
This article is part of the Research Topic Learning foreign languages: experiences of persons with disabilities and special educational needs and their teachers View all 7 articles

Beyond Barriers: Exploring Foreign Language Learning Experiences of Students with Diverse Learning Needs in four European countries

Provisionally accepted
MARIANTHI KARATSIORI MARIANTHI KARATSIORI 1*Trisevgeni Liontou Trisevgeni Liontou 2Ewa Domagala-zysk Ewa Domagala-zysk 3Karin Vogt Karin Vogt 4Milena Košak Babuder Milena Košak Babuder 5Mojca Poredos Mojca Poredos 5
  • 1 University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece
  • 2 National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece
  • 3 The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Lublin, Lublin Voivodeship, Poland
  • 4 Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
  • 5 University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    While foreign language learning is increasingly recognized as crucial for educational and social inclusion, the experiences of students with diverse learning needs in foreign language classrooms remain understudied. This study investigated the relationship between Personal Engagement personal engagement PE and Llearning Aattitudes (LA) among students with diverse learning needs in foreign language learning contexts across four European countries (Greece, Germany, Slovenia, and Poland). The study involved 95 students (aged 8-25) with various learning needs: visual impairment (n=16), deafness/hard of hearing (n=14), physical/motor impairment (n=32), and learning difficulties (n=33). Data were collected through interviews, including items of the Foreign Language Enjoyment scale (Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2014), examining both personal engagement PE and learning attitudeLAs. Results revealed that learning attitudeLA scores consistently exceeded personal engagement PE scores across all groups, with students with physical impairments showing the strongest correlation between engagement and attitudes (r=0.674, p<0.001), while students with visual impairments demonstrated high learning attitudeLAs despite moderate engagement levels. Students with diverse learning needs maintain remarkably positive attitudes toward foreign language learning despite varying engagement levels, suggesting that educational barriers may be more related to access and delivery methods than to students' willingness to learn. This emphasizes the need for tailored support strategies that can transform positive attitudes into fuller engagement across different types of learning needs.

    Keywords: foreign language learning, Diverse learning needs, personal engagement, learning attitudeLAs, Inclusive education, cross-national study

    Received: 31 Oct 2024; Accepted: 04 Feb 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 KARATSIORI, Liontou, Domagala-zysk, Vogt, Košak Babuder and Poredos. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: MARIANTHI KARATSIORI, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece

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