"Let me know in the comments": Exploring student engagement strategies in short-form instructional videos on Instagram

The topic of student engagement has received increasing attention in the field of foreign language teaching, due to its direct connection with improved academic results. At the same time, digital methods for teaching foreign languages have been on the rise: one of the latest novelties is the short-form content created by educational influencers on social media platforms. This type of instructional video has gained significant popularity, with some profiles reaching millions of followers. In order to better understand this phenomenon, the aim of this research is to investigate the strategies used by educational creators on Instagram to engage viewers on the behavioral and emotional level. The accounts of three major Italian teacherpreneurs were observed for a period of one month to collect and record the necessary data. Multimodal Discourse Analysis and multimodal pedagogic discourse studies were combined to design a framework that allowed for the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected dataset. Results show the importance of multimodality to create engaging tasks on the behavioral level, while affective engagement is influenced mostly by the informal and enjoyable learning environment created by the teachers. Moreover, a study of the quantitative distribution of engagement cues and strategies throughout the rhetorical moves of this genre was conducted. The opening of videos mainly uses affective engagement cues to attract viewers in the first few seconds, while the ending focuses on behavioral tasks that invite learners to interact with the video through the comment section. This study covers the existing gap in literature on the malleability of student engagement, since previous research mainly concentrated on the experience of the students rather than the strategies that can be implemented by the teachers.