How Weekly Challenges Help Multilingual Learners Overcome Apathy and Reconnect With School
- Kyle Larson
- 3 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Across the country, teachers are naming the same problem in different ways:
Multilingual learners feel disconnected from school. High school feels overwhelming, and many students simply don’t see the point.
Some believe English is too hard to learn. Others assume school doesn’t matter because they’ll work with family or follow a predetermined path after graduation. For many multilingual learners, apathy isn’t defiance—it’s self-protection.
I’ve felt this myself.
As a student, I often believed that what I did in school had little impact on my future. I did “well enough” without much effort, which quietly taught me something dangerous: that effort didn’t matter. No one helped me see how small, consistent actions could compound over time.
That experience shaped how we think about motivation today—especially for middle and high school multilingual learners.
The Core Issue: English Learning Feels Too Big to Start
When students hear goals like “improve your English” or “participate more in class,” the task feels abstract and distant. For students already carrying linguistic and cognitive load, that vagueness leads to disengagement.
What students actually need is:
A clear starting point
A short time horizon
A visible way to succeed
That’s why we built weekly challenges into ACE: The Next Level.
Why Weekly Challenges Work for Multilingual Learners
Weekly challenges break language learning into small, achievable actions that students can complete during regular class time. Each week, students commit to one concrete behavior and reflect on it.
Instead of asking students to “care more,” we ask questions like:
What is your goal for this quarter?
This quarter, I want to…
This week, I will use a sentence starter / ask a question / use a new word.
How did you do this quarter?
What will you do differently next quarter?
These prompts—taken directly from the weekly challenge tracker students use across nine weeks—anchor reflection in reality rather than abstraction Weekly Challenges.
Each week also includes:
A simple commitment checkbox
A participation self-rating
A short reflection on speaking, listening, reading, or writing
The cognitive load stays low, the expectations stay clear, and students begin to see evidence of their own effort.
What Research Says About Small Wins and Motivation
This structure is supported by decades of learning science.
Research on self-efficacy, most notably by Albert Bandura, shows that mastery experiences—small successes students attribute to their own actions—are the strongest driver of motivation. Not praise. Not pressure. Proof of progress.
In addition, Hattie & Timperley’s (2007) synthesis of over 500 studies on feedback found that learning accelerates when students have:
Clear, specific goals
Frequent opportunities to reflect
Feedback tied to task-level actions
Weekly challenges do exactly that. They turn language learning into something students can see themselves doing, rather than something happening to them.
Click below to download our weekly checklist.
Addressing Apathy Without Adding Pressure
Many English learners don’t lack ability. They lack a reason to try this week.
Weekly challenges reframe school from something abstract and endless into something manageable:
Win the week
Reflect briefly
Reset next week
Over time, students shift from:
None of this matters.
to:
I can do one thing this week.”
That shift matters—especially in middle and high school, when beliefs about effort and identity are still forming.
Why This Matters for Middle and High School Multilingual Learners
Secondary students are developmentally ready to reflect—but only if the reflection feels real.
Weekly challenges:
Make language growth visible
Normalize effort over perfection
Encourage participation across content classes
Help students connect school actions to personal agency
They don’t promise instant motivation; they create momentum. And for students who feel checked out, momentum is everything.
Want to see what this looks like in practice?
Ace The Next Level has many resouces students need to be successful in high school. The section in which you will find the above resource, however, is built around weekly challenges like the ones described above—clear commitments, low cognitive load, and small wins that help middle and high school students reconnect with language, school, and their own progress.
View Ace The Next Level and explore how weekly challenges help students win the week—and the year.
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