Study Abroad Research in Second Language Acquisition and International Education - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2018

The present study examines a US Department of Defense (DOD) foreign language program using linear and logistic regression to model foreign language proficiency growth over three time intervals. The analysis demonstrates growth from start to finish for a program involving domestic immersion and study abroad and tests the ability of aptitude and achievement measures to predict that growth for a group of 80 students. The findings suggest that a measure of foreign language aptitude and a measure of quantitative aptitude differentiate learning outcomes for the intensive domestic immersion portion of the program while measures of quantitative aptitude and native language verbal aptitude differentiate later-stage learners on the study abroad portion of the program.

This mixed-method study describes the oral Mandarin development of 25 American students living in Chinese homestays, and how it may relate to the ways they respond to opportunities for interaction with their host families. While scholars have begun to examine students’ Mandarin development during their sojourns in China, there is little research regarding changes in their holistic oral proficiency and how such changes may be related to the quality of interaction they have with their interlocutors. The results of this study show robust gains in proficiency ratings of their oral performances over the course of one semester. A case study of two purposefully selected student performances – one who demonstrated the most prominent proficiency gains and the other who showed no gains – reveals differences in the ways they respond to opportunities for interaction. These findings provide suggestions on ways to best facilitate students’ learning experience while living with host families.

The aim of this study was to examine how a group of 20 learners of second-language French express gender marking in three written tasks administered over the course of 21 months, including an academic year abroad. All full nouns modified by either a determiner or an adjective overtly marked for gender were analyzed (n = 1,601), and each token was coded for a set of extralinguistic and linguistic features identified in previous literature as playing a role in gender marking. The analysis reveals that targetlike rates of use increased between pre-stay testing and in-stay testing, and that levels were maintained at post-stay. In addition, three factors – time, noun gender, and syllable distance – were found to significantly characterize behavior with respect to gender marking.

This study uses multiple sources of data to examine the learning of leave-taking in Indonesian by twelve students from Australia during a sojourn of either four or seven weeks. The learners departed with very little knowledge of leave-taking routines. They rapidly learned the forms of certain routines, and used them often. However they did not learn suitable contexts for them, and also failed to learn a number of other common routines. Under influence of English, they relied excessively on statements of obligation for taking leave but also adopted one useful discourse marker. The study confirms that pragmatic routines are a site of rapid learning during study abroad, while suggesting some very common routines are hard to learn by naturalistic exposure. It confirms study abroad learners are often slow to learn to adjust forms to social context, and shows the powerful influence of L1 transfer on their pragmatic development.

This study examines the development of pragmatic awareness of the German second person pronoun system by Australian study-abroad participants during a six-week language course in Germany. Data includes oral pre- and post- Language Awareness Interviews, semi-structured interviews and participant observation. Students displayed a greater awareness of the German address system and showed a growing confidence and sophistication in justifying their choices of address forms as well as an increased reliance on information acquired from native and expert speakers throughout their stay in Germany. Interview data and field notes indicate that students were socialised into second language (L2) practices of address term use by way of explicit correction from L2 speech community members on incorrect use of address forms. Such correction appears to have influenced their pragmatic development. The study supports previous research stating that even short stays abroad can encourage improvement in language features that are difficult to acquire in the classroom ( Hassall, 2013 ) and shows why this is particularly beneficial in the context of German Studies due to the preference for direct and explicit speech in the German speech community.

This exploratory study investigates the development of personality dimensions related to multicultural effectiveness and its relation to amount of target language use and self-perceived progress in speaking during a sojourn abroad in seven European countries. The participants were 59 Swedish and Belgian university students. The Multicultural Personality Questionnaire – Short Form ( van der Zee, Van Oudenhoven, Ponterotto, & Fietzer, 2013 ) was administered at the beginning and the end of the semester, and data on self-reported weekly hours of target language use and self-perceived linguistic progress were gathered at Time 2. The main findings are the observed moderate or near moderate correlations between self-perceived progress in speaking and change in Cultural Empathy, and between amount of target language use and change in Cultural Empathy and Openmindedness. This points to the relevance of further studies on the role of target language use and progress in the development of personality characteristics.