A COUNTRY IN FOCUS : AUSTRIA Research in language teaching and learning in Austria (2011–2017) Christiane Dalton-Puffer 1 *, Klaus-Börge Boeckmann 2 and Barbara Hinger 3 1 University of Vienna, Austria; 2 University College of Teacher Education Styria, Graz, Austria; and 3 Innsbruck University, Austria *Corresponding author. Email: christiane.dalton-puffer@univie.ac.at Abstract This overview of seven years of research on language learning and teaching in Austria reflects a period of steady growth for the language teaching and learning research community, a development due to a national policy agenda aiming for a stronger research base in teacher education. The target languages of the teaching and learning processes investigated are primarily German, English, French, Italian, Spanish as well as several Slavic languages, reflecting the geographical, sociolinguistic and language policy situation of this increasingly multilingual country. This multilingualism means there are clearly many more first languages (L1s) than only German involved in the learning situations investigated. While all the studies reviewed here illustrate research driven by a combination of local and global concerns in con- nection with different theoretical frameworks, some specific clusters of research interest emerge. These are: societal and individual multilingualism, language education policy, language teacher education, language(s) in other subjects, early language learning, language acquisition and learning, literature and culture, testing and standardisation, digital media, and teaching materials. 1. Introduction – purpose, scope, and methodology This research overview for Austria covers the period between 2011 and 2017 and follows up on an earlier one covering 2004 to 2009 (Dalton-Puffer, Faistauer, & Vetter, 2011). The overview aims to give an international readership access to the most recent research on language teaching and learning by scholars based in Austria, a small landlocked country in central Europe bordering on eight neigh- bouring states that have nine different official languages. The population of Austria itself is mainly German-speaking with a variety of German dialects. In addition, there are seven official language minorities (including Austrian sign language) and numerous non-official immigrant ones. It is thus evident that this is a country where languages are always on the agenda – for basic information on Austria’s sociolinguistic situation and educational system see Dalton-Puffer et al. (2011). Our aim in this article is to provide access to work that may be invisible to researchers outside the German-speaking world. This means that work that is easily accessible internationally (which effectively means published with international publishers, mostly in English) will be mentioned but discussed in less detail than other publications. The selection of the material we present is based on a process of nationwide data-gathering performed for the purposes of this article. A number of steps were taken to ensure a principled and balanced selection. A call to the national research community was issued in 2016, which resulted in a database of over 1,200 publications (continuously updated in the course of writing the article), about three times as many as for the first country overview (Dalton-Puffer et al., 2011). The necessary decisions regarding selection were guided by a combination of formal and thematic criteria. We report on monographs, book chapters, journal articles and doctoral dissertations but also include project reports or technical © Cambridge University Press 2019 Language Teaching (2019), 52, 201–230 doi:10.1017/S026144481900003X https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S026144481900003X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 80.110.67.57, on 18 Jun 2019 at 05:49:22, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at