Study Abroad, Second Language Acquisition and Interculturality

Martin Howard

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788924160
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Psycolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book unites a range of emerging topics in the burgeoning transdisciplinary fields of second language acquisition and interculturality in a study abroad context. It explores key issues, trends and approaches within each strand and how the strands relate to one another, painting a big picture of the diversity and complexity underpinning second language acquisition in a study abroad context. The chapters highlight themes such as social networks, input and interaction issues, learner identities and study abroad in lingua franca contexts, while also presenting other themes spanning the breadth of second language acquisition and interculturality research, such as individual differences and linguistic development. This comprehensive and cohesive volume showcases the latest innovative research using quantitative, qualitative and mixed method approaches across a range of source and target language learner cohorts, and highlights emerging themes and directions for future research.

1 Second Language Acquisition and Interculturality during Study Abroad: Issues and Perspectives. An Introduction to the Volume

Martin Howard

Introduction

Situated within the field of study abroad research, this book reflects the burgeoning interest in study abroad learners who undertake a period of residence abroad, usually but by no means necessarily as part of their academic programme of study. Such study abroad learners constitute an important cohort among our student population not only within a university context, but also at secondary and indeed primary school level. In the former case, a vast range of programmes are available to both language and non-language students, such as the now long-established European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students (Erasmus) programme in Europe that celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2017 and has seen well over 3 million university students partake, usually for a semester or a full academic year. Beyond Europe, short-term study abroad over a couple of weeks is especially popular in a North American context, with students sometimes accompanied by staff members of their home university through various University of X programmes in city Y especially in Europe and South America. In an Asian context, a number of countries are key sending countries, such as China, South Korea and India, with many students choosing to undertake a full degree programme of study in a host university abroad (for recent statistics, see Plews & Jackson [2017]; for details on the Japanese context, see Grimes-McLellan [2017] who outlines a number of constraints on levels of participation in that context in spite of government initiatives to facilitate study abroad; Yang [2016] offers interesting perspectives on intra-Asia mobility, focusing on Chinese talent students in Singapore). From the perspective of Australia and New Zealand, research has especially focused on students going to Japan (see Marriott, 1995), with some research on incoming students from Asia, e.g. Benson et al. (2013) and Jackson (2017) on Hong Kong students, as well as Patron’s (2007) work on French students in Australia. Beyond these geographical regions, there is, however, little information on students from Africa and South America, in spite of initiatives in some countries in the latter context to promote study abroad, such as Brazil’s Science without Borders programme. In the Caribbean context, Craig (2016) offers insights into the challenges faced by such universities where the financial and personal investment required on the part of the student is often prohibitive.

Such a diverse range of opportunities and initiatives to get students on the move reflects the significant internationalisation of higher education, where students can avail of study abroad through full degree programmes at a host university, through exchange programmes from within their home university, initiatives to spend time abroad through a work placement, summer language course or indeed simply spending time in another country for a purpose related to their studies such as in a country where the learner’s second language (L2) is dominant. At pre-university levels in the case of secondary and primary school pupils, some also participate in organised study abroad as part of their studies such as through attending school in another country for a specific period of time, usually where they are learning the host language. But the primary means of enhancing their language skills is through summer language programmes over a couple of weeks, which are well known across Europe, especially in the UK and Ireland. A further but often forgotten cohort within the study abroad enterprise concerns professionals, especially teachers who avail of inter-university exchange programmes as part of their professional development (for a study in a North American context, see Bournot-Trites et al. [2018]), with teachers in a European context benefitting from the European Union COMENIUS programme.

Taken together, such learner cohorts and diversity of programme types reflect the rich array of participants in terms of age and background profiles and the focus and aim of study. Given their importance within our educational institutions, study abroad research has rightly emerged as an independent subfield within the wider field that is contemporary applied linguistics to capture the vast range of issues that study abroad raises, ranging from pre-departure matters such as programme type, timing of study abroad, duration of stay abroad and student preparation, issues during study abroad such as programme structure and make-up, the learner’s raison d’être abroad and residence type, among others, to post-study abroad matters such as the learner’s reintegration and long-term benefits. Across the study abroad literature, such issues are explored through a multifaceted prism that includes linguistic, intercultural, academic, educational, personal, social and professional development and outcomes during study abroad.

The focus of this book is essentially on the former two; while the personal and the social necessarily interact with linguistic and intercultural development, the chapters presented reflect the strong link between study abroad research and second language acquisition (SLA) and interculturality research. We provide a synopsis of issues in both domains in the following.

The Interface Between Study Abroad Research, Second Language Acquisition and Interculturality: Questions and Issues

While study abroad research can be traced back to Carroll’s (1967) initial study such that it has emerged relatively contemporaneously to SLA, it is only since the mid-1990s with the publication of Freed’s (1995a) seminal volume and especially since the early 2000s that the field has become particularly buoyant. As we noted above, while the focus is multifaceted, the impact of study abroad on the learner’s L2 development has given rise to a vast array of empirical studies that highlight not only the challenges faced by the L2 learner but also the significant linguistic gains to be made in a study abroad context. While illuminating in themselves of SLA processes and outcomes, they also contribute to a range of key questions in SLA research such that they serve a dual purpose of informing study abroad research and contributing to debates within SLA. Those issues are threefold, reflecting the scope of SLA research, namely issues underpinning the learner’s L2 development, input and interaction issues and, finally, individual factors at play in the acquisition process.

With regard to L2 linguistic development, study abroad research serves to significantly illuminate the relation between learning context and the specificity of such development. In particular, a key question concerns how development may differ across learning contexts, with the traditional dichotomy being made between the foreign language classroom and the naturalistic context. In this regard, with the increasing popularity of study abroad, a mixture of learner experiences between both contexts is increasingly true of many learners, with some also benefitting from immersion experiences outside of the target language community such as through residential summer schools. While early SLA research may have assigned a limited role to the impact of learning context in so far as acquisition processes are believed to be fundamentally the same across learners, more recent approaches that highlight the role of individual, social and contextual factors have enhanced research interest in the relation between such factors and L2 learner development. In this regard, a range of issues have become increasingly pertinent as a wealth of research on linguistic development during study abroad has brought to the fore the complexity of such development.

In particular, questions arise concerning the specificity of linguistic development in so far as development may not be a case of ‘all or nothing’ (see Howard, 2005). In other words, certain components of the learner’s linguistic repertoire in the L2 may be more prone to development with others being more resistant. Questions arise therefore as to why such development may not be uniform, with some researchers suggesting that study abroad lends itself to the development of more social aspects of language use (see Kinginger, 2009), while others suggest that it may impact less marked features than marked ones (see Howard & Schwieter, 2018). While in some ways such questions relate to linguistic outcomes in terms of the use of specific skills and the use of specific linguistic features in learner language, a further question concerns the potential of the learning context to impact processes of learning such that the stages of linguistic development may differ. In other words, study abroad may simply speed up the acquisition process without fundamentally changing the process, such that learners who do not venture abroad may demonstrate relatively similar outcomes at a later stage.

While the study abroad literature on linguistic development provides extensive insight through various longitudinal and control group comparison studies on the scope and specificity of linguistic development, perhaps the more pertinent question for understanding the complex relation between learning context and L2 development that such studies point to concerns the reasons underlying such a complex relation. On this count, Howard and Schwieter (2018) offer some insight in the case of grammatical development, but there is scope in the study abroad literature to move beyond the level of descriptive studies to more adequately consider the role of learning context at a theoretical level in terms of issues that may be at play in linguistic development when learners change learning context. Indeed, here, an interesting perspective for the future would concern the long-term impact of study abroad in terms of learner retention, attrition and further development of the linguistic gains made abroad following their return to the foreign language classroom, and indeed in the longer term thereafter, as well as in areas less subject to development during a sojourn abroad but perhaps more conducive to development in the foreign language classroom (for further discussion, see Howard & Schwieter [2018]).

While linguistic development does not happen independently without language contact, a further key area concerns its relation to the linguistic input available during the learner’s stay abroad, with folk belief holding that study abroad represents an ideal combination of instructed exposure in the foreign language classroom followed by naturalistic exposure in the target language community. Such a change in context raises questions of the learner’s ability to utilise the specificity of the input available in the target language community whose characteristics are very different from the written input that dominates and the explicit, metalinguistic information available in many instructed learning environments, although some more implicit input is obviously available. In some ways, the instructed learner has been ‘trained’ to process the input available in a way that may be very different when confronted with the masses of naturalistic implicit input available abroad where learners often humbly realise the limitations of their prior learning. Learners are faced with the challenge of learning to segment, process and comprehend such naturalistic spontaneous streams of speech that are not necessarily subject to the input modifications that they enjoy in the classroom, even if some input and interactional modifications are necessarily present during interaction in real time abroad (for discussion of input and interactional modifications in SLA, see Long [1985]). In many ways, the more controlled input available in the foreign language classroom in terms at least of the input and interactional modifications that it lends itself to may constitute a ‘safer’ but not necessarily authentic environment for the learner.

Beyond listening and indeed reading comprehension of the input available, a further challenge concerns the need to enhance learners’ production skills so as to demonstrate the putative linguistic development that study abroad facilitates. On this count, the challenges are many whereby the learner must learn to increasingly automatise the metalinguistic skills previously learnt across the full range of components that make up the learner’s linguistic repertoire in the L2 such as in relation to pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary, grammar and interactional competence, as well as developing some components that may not feature significantly in the instructed input such as sociolinguistic and sociopragmatic skills. As noted, such instructed input is often in the written medium, but the linguistic production development we refer to extends beyond writing to speaking skills. Taken together, the change in learning context and the input exposure conditions that that entails raises significant questions about the potential for study abroad to impact on the full breadth of the learner’s linguistic skills across the components constituting that linguistic repertoire.

While the latter issues pertain to the nature of the learner’s linguistic development abroad, they necessarily interact with the learner’s engagement with the input available in that environment. On this count, several other key issues for SLA researchers are pertinent beyond the input comprehension ones to which we have alluded. A first matter concerns the characteristics of the input in relation to frequency, transparency and salience issues, where questions arise concerning how items that are more frequent, transparent and salient in the input may be more easily acquired than those that are less frequent, less transparent and less salient. In this regard, usage-based approaches to SLA that highlight such matters can gain si...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• 1 Second Language Acquisition and Interculturality during Study Abroad: Issues and Perspectives. An Introduction to the Volume
• 2 ‘Cantonese is My Own Eyes and English is Just My Glasses’: The Evolving Language and Intercultural Attitudes of a Chinese Study Abroad Student
• 3 Study Abroad and Students’ Discourse on ‘Cultural Difference’: A Longitudinal View
• 4 Discursive Identity Work and Interculturality during Blue-Collar Work Practice Abroad: Finnish Engineering Students as Language Learners and Users
• 5 English as a Lingua Franca, Motivation and Identity in Study Abroad
• 6 Study Abroad as a Context for Learning English as an International Language: An Exploratory Study
• 7 Long-Term Residence Abroad and SLA: The Case of Cultural Migrants in France
• 8 What First Exposure Studies of Input can Contribute to Study Abroad Research
• 9 Understanding Socialisation and Integration through Social Network Analysis: American and Chinese Students during a Stay Abroad
• 10 Individual Differences in Study Abroad Research: Sources, Processes and Outcomes of Students’ Development in Language, Culture and Personhood
• 11 Four Questions for the Next Generation of Study Abroad Researchers
• Index