Abstract
Student engagement is one of the hottest research topics and is referred to as the “Holy Grail” of learning (Sinatra et al., 2015, p. 1). Although much attention has been paid to the relationship between student engagement and academic achievement, integrating these two variables has not been conducted in the context of second language acquisition. This study synthesizes previous research that quantitatively examined the relationship between dimensions of student engagement (i.e., behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and others) in second language learning and academic achievement. We searched for previous studies representing the relationship between the two variables in terms of effect size r. Out of the 1,373 studies that included “engagement” in the title, keywords, or abstract, 18 articles were eligible for the meta-analysis. The results showed that the correlations between overall, behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and others, and academic achievement were r = .23, .24, .26, .16, and .23, respectively. We also analyzed the language learning context as a moderator and found correlations between the specific unit or general context and academic achievement, respectively (r = .39, and .22). Implications for future research based on the results of this study, as well as discussions on limitations will be discussed.
