Migrant Students’ Emotions and Perceptions of collaborative writing: The role of educational setting, educational level and (non-)migrant background

Within a socio-cultural framework of language teaching and a mixed methods design, the present study explores the emotional impact of collaborative writing activities on (non-) migrant students in formal education as well as their perceptions towards collaboration. The study examined whether emotions and perceptions about collaboration are differentially affected by educational level (primary vs. junior high school), educational setting (reception vs. mainstream class) as well as students’ background (migrant, non-migrant). The data were obtained by means of questionnaires and were analyzed both quantitatively by means of linear mixed-effects models and qualitatively by means of thematic analysis. The results revealed that students overall exhibited more positive than negative emotions. Even more, primary school students in the mainstream class exhibited weaker negative emotions compared to students in the reception class, and marginally stronger positive emotions and weaker negative emotions compared to junior high school students in the mainstream class. Primary school students in the mainstream class were the only group who did not exhibit negative emotions towards collaboration. Furthermore, junior high school students exhibited more negative emotions and reported more collaboration difficulties compared to primary school students, which could be associated with different conceptualization of group work among different ages as well as with different social group dynamics between the mainstream class of primary school and the mainstream class of junior high school along with different orientation of the school curricula.