Study Abroad Research in Second Language Acquisition and International Education - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2021

This study examined the relationship between reported amounts of social contact and speech act strategies among 70 learners of Chinese enrolled in a study abroad program in Beijing. The participants completed a computer-delivered spoken discourse completion task (spoken DCT) eliciting three speech acts: requests, refusals, and compliment responses. Speech act strategies were compared between two groups of learners who reported different amounts of social contact (high and low social contact) as assessed via a self-report survey. Results showed that both high and low social contact groups favored using similar strategies to achieve the three speech acts. However, the high social contact group produced speech acts in a more sophisticated way: with a wider variety of request strategies, multiple refusal strategies used in combination and more deflecting strategies in compliment responses, compared with the low social contact group. The findings suggest that social contact helped learners expand their pragmalinguistic repertoire and employ more varied speech act strategies.

Though study abroad (SA) is becoming an increasingly popular educational avenue for second-language (L2) learners, there is little knowledge of what factors create a successful learning experience. One methodological approach is to consider the amount of time students use their L2 while abroad, and subsequently consider what factors (linguistic, personal, or social) might lead to increased or diminished L2 use. The current study examines data collected in 2010, in which 27 learners from an intensive overseas-immersion program in Spain completed the Language Contact Profile (LCP). Throughout the program, the learners were bound to a language commitment, pledging to speak, read, and write only in their L2. The results presented here, both quantitative and qualitative, suggest that the language pledge was largely followed, reflecting high levels of L2 use; the results also allude to some advantages and disadvantages of using the LCP to track language use.

Social interactions that take place during study abroad in linguistically rich settings are important for oral proficiency development; however, few studies have explicitly examined the underlying network structure of students’ social experiences in study abroad contexts and its role in oral proficiency development. This mixed-methods research examined the relationship between self-reported social network structures and self-perceived English oral proficiency gains among 88 Chinese international students at a UK university. While the majority of participants’ networks consisted of Chinese-speaking peers, most of them managed to develop strong and frequent relations with English-speaking peers. Students reported gains in oral proficiency, especially in areas related to language use that require higher levels of proficiency. Diverse networks with significant and high-frequency English-speaking relationships were more likely to be associated with L2 oral proficiency gains, while dense networks with only frequent and strong in-group relationships could potentially limit L2 development.

This study focuses on language socialization during study abroad and specifically second language learning in communities of practice. Based on oral interviews in French and English, written journals, and weekly surveys, this study examines one participant’s second language (L2) learning during a semester abroad during which he became a member of two communities of practice: his host family and a local gaming group. The participant negotiated and became more confident in his L2 identity and learning over time and increasingly solidified his membership within these groups. This study analyzes the steps taken by the participant using the framework of legitimate peripheral participation and considers identity and learning that develop within a community of practice.

Previous research on the benefits of study abroad (SA) has mainly focused on oral communication skills and L2 English, while written communication and other foreign languages have received far less attention. This study addresses this gap by investigating writing development in L2 German. It also aims to further the discussion about methods to assess writing development by combining different types of data. The writing gains of 30 Belgian students in L2 German were investigated after one semester abroad. Pre- and post-SA writing samples were analysed using linguistic and task-related assessment criteria. The results are triangulated with data about self-perceived language gains, on the one hand, and self-reported language contact and social networks during SA, on the other. The results indicate a correlation between self-report writing gains, language contact, and social networks.

Given the notable increase in participation in short-term (e.g., eight weeks or less) study abroad, especially in the US, recent empirical work on the role of context in second language (L2) learning has sought to investigate the impact of a short-term stay abroad on language development. The present study examined English-speaking learners’ syntactic complexity development in oral narratives after a four-week stay abroad. With regard to three measures of syntactic complexity (length of analysis of speech [AS]-units, number of clauses per AS-unit, length of clause), findings revealed that the study abroad group demonstrated no statistically significant change over the study period. However, individual-level analyses revealed that over half of the study abroad learners increased complexity in narratives in terms of clause length. Further, half of the study abroad learners exhibited increases in syntactic complexity on at least two of the three syntactic complexity measures examined.