Summer School Recap: Ecological and Mixed-Methods Perspectives on Language Education

From 29 June to 3 July 2026, 25 master’s and PhD students from across the Circle U. alliance and beyond, undeterred by the heatwave, gathered at the University of Vienna for the Circle U. summer school, Researching Language/s in Education from an Ecological and Mixed-methods Perspective. 

Through a combination of lectures and interactive workshops, the summer school focused on how ecological perspectives and mixed-methods research can help capture the complexity of language learning and classroom language use through a meaningful integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches. 

The Blended Intensive Programme started with a month of asynchronous online work, during which all participants shared and commented on their research interests, provided first ideas about their research projects and engaged in some preparatory readings for the first on-site day, which kicked off with three lectures introducing the theoretical foundations of ecological classroom research and mixed-methods thinking. Participants reflected on topics such as ecological validity, integrating multiple sources of data, and drawing conclusions from mixed-methods datasets. Throughout the week, the participants also had the chance to present their own projects and talk about challenges they had encountered, receiving constructive feedback from peers and lecturers.

A key feature of the summer school was its workshop format. Each day, participants selected from parallel sessions offered by 13 applied linguists from three Circle U. universities (UCLouvain, Universitetet i Oslo, Universität Wien), which allowed them to adjust the programme to their own research interests. Topics ranged from video-based classroom observation, Design-Based Research, technology and artificial intelligence in language learning, and disciplinary literacies in CLIL and EMI, to multi-faceted Rasch analysis, plurilingual classroom practices, emotions in foreign language learning, and configurational analysis in English-medium higher education.

One workshop also turned the focus towards the Circle U. alliance itself. Participants familiarised themselves with the Circle U. Language Compass, developed by the Circle U. Multilingualism and Intercultural Learning (CU.mil) platform as a practical guide for navigating multilingual communication across the alliance. Working alongside participants of the Alliance Hopping Tour preceding the European Universities Initiative: 2nd Research and Practice Symposium, they discussed institutional language policies, reflected on plurilingual practices in higher education, and suggested ways of putting the Compass into practice.

The diversity of workshops reflected the equally diverse backgrounds of the participants. While all shared an interest in language learning and education, they approached these topics from different perspectives. This environment encouraged participants to exchange common practices, discover new methodological approaches, and think about how their own project might benefit from ideas from other research traditions.

One thing could be seen (and heard) as soon as you walked through the doors of the lecture hall: the summer school’s multilingual and international atmosphere. Participants brought with them different first languages and created an environment where linguistic diversity was not only acknowledged but actively embraced. Discussions naturally moved across languages, and participants exchanged ideas from a wide range of educational contexts.

As one participant reflected:
"The fact that we are students from such a wide range of universities and countries and perspectives, it's kind of overwhelming but in a good way. There's always something interesting I feel like I could get from talking with basically everybody. There are a lot of non-English interactions in many ways. And that can vary from, you know, I can't understand what they're saying at all, up until I'm trying to get a word from here and there from languages that are the same. But it's a very free environment where people are speaking all sorts of languages without it being an issue."

Another participant emphasized the importance of learning alongside peers from different linguistic and disciplinary backgrounds:
"I think I was able to get a better perspective on my own work by seeing where it's situated within this larger context of language education and it was also really interesting to see the different angles that people are bringing into their own research and which part of mixed methods language education interests them. That made me feel like part of a really special group."

As participants returned to their home institutions, they took with them not only new methodological insights but also new collaborations. While they identified different highlights in response to the post-event survey, they all agreed that they would fully recommend participating in future re-issues of this summer school.