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- Volume 2, Issue, 2017
Study Abroad Research in Second Language Acquisition and International Education - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2017
Volume 2, Issue 2, 2017
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Introduction to the special issue
Author(s): John L. Plews and Jane Jacksonpp.: 137–146 (10)More Less
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Challenges for study abroad in contemporary Japan
Author(s): Dawn Grimes-MacLellanpp.: 147–174 (28)More LessAs the number of university students studying abroad has skyrocketed globally, waning Japanese participation stands in sharp contrast. What accounts for this decline? Drawing on ethnographic research, including surveys and semi-structured interviews, conducted in fall 2016 with 14 Japanese undergraduate students majoring in the social sciences, this article discusses current challenges influencing outbound Japanese student mobility. In contrast to contemporary social discourse in Japan that has criticized young Japanese as ‘inward-looking’ and unwilling to take on new challenges, including studying abroad, my results reveal that students continue to aspire to overseas study but are also concerned about costs and other challenges. The article closes with a discussion of how a small but growing number of Japanese students are addressing impediments by taking matters into their own hands, and how this emerging trend may require a reinterpretation of statistics suggesting a decline in Japanese participation in study abroad.
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The American gaze east
Author(s): Emma Trentman and Wenhao Diaopp.: 175–205 (31)More LessThe 21st century has seen an emphasis in US media and policy documents on increasing the numbers of US students studying abroad and also the amount of US students studying ‘critical’ languages. This paper examines the intersection of these discourses, or the experiences of critical language learners abroad. We analyze this intersection by using critical discourse analysis to examine US media and policy documents and data from students studying Arabic in Egypt and Mandarin in China. This analysis reveals considerable discrepancies between rhetoric and experience in terms of language and intercultural learning. We argue that a critical examination of current discourses of study abroad (SA) reveals that they in fact recreate the colonial map, mask global inequalities, and create a new global elite. We conclude that language and intercultural learning abroad will remain a source of tension until SA students and programs critically engage with these discourses.
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Duty, desire, and Japaneseness
Author(s): Levi Durbidgepp.: 206–239 (34)More LessThis qualitative study draws on identity theory to explore the short-term study abroad and language learning experiences of Japanese high school students from a private high school near Tokyo as they travelled to the UK and the USA. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews both before and after the program, combined with daily journals written by the students, and then subjected to thematic analysis. Several themes emerged among the students’ accounts of their experiences, including drawing on Japanese cultural identities to interpret difficult intercultural experiences, seeing English-mediated identities as a means to overcome pressure to conform to idealized notions of Japanese femininity, and feeling a sense of duty to parents as a motivator to study abroad. These findings demonstrate the diversity of experiences in high school programs and highlight a need for further research on students travelling from non-English-speaking backgrounds to study abroad.
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Linguistic identity changes of Chinese international students in Germany
Author(s): Jingyue Maeder-Qianpp.: 240–262 (23)More LessThis article presents findings from a pilot study that aimed to examine Chinese international students’ linguistic identity changes in relation to their English as a lingua franca (ELF) experience and their multilingual competencies in Germany. Data were collected through two rounds of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with seven Chinese postgraduate students over a period of three to five months, with email reports as a supplementary method. A phenomenological approach was then used to interpret four students’ study-abroad experience by looking at relationships among language, identity, and context. The findings suggest that most of the ELF-users demonstrated positive transformation of linguistic identities within the university setting, but ELF also led to a role of ‘bystander’ in German society. The Chinese students’ multilingual identity development demonstrated diverse features and various reasons for this were identified, such as the context in which their social interaction took place, the perceived power relationships between speakers, and the extent of their multilingual competencies.
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L1-L2 speaker interaction in a study abroad setting
Author(s): Abigail McMeekinpp.: 263–294 (32)More LessAnalyzing approximately nine hours of video-recorded naturally-occurring conversations over eight weeks of study abroad between three L2 speakers of Japanese and their L1 speaker host family members, the present study uses conversation analysis to explore how the participants manage intersubjectivity using communication strategies in word searches. Specifically the study explores the following: (a) how participants deploy, manipulate, and respond to communication strategies as interactional resources used to co-construct meaning and progressively disambiguate the referent sought; (b) how strategies are used within the sequential organization of word searches to guide the trajectory of the search on a turn-by-turn basis; (c) how linguistic and non-linguistic resources such as intonation and eye gaze are used in conjunction with strategies to organize participant structure and relevant action in the unfolding talk; and (d) how a microanalytic, interactional approach can redefine our understanding of how strategic mechanisms are used and labeled in interaction.
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Dialect and identity
Author(s): Angela George and Anne Hoffman-González
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The American gaze east
Author(s): Emma Trentman and Wenhao Diao
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