What happens when students do activities in modern-language classrooms in higher education? A comparative, reflective study

This article reports on a small-scale action-research project carried out across two higher education contexts, in Finland and in France, with learners of German (as L3) and English (as L2) respectively. The aim of the project was to explore how students get into and stay in student-centred activities and the use of target language throughout these. Through this small-scale action research project we sought to explore the match or mismatch between expectations of what language learning activity types bring learners and the various language mediations we observed in our FL/ESP classrooms.