It’s natural to expect students in a language immersion program to quickly improve, but what is really happening?
Wenhao Diao, Head of the Department of East Asian Studies, began doing research into language learning in study abroad programs in 2010, trying to measure linguistic gains, like how many words or syllables students could speak in a period of time.
“We found some gains in oral fluency and proficiency, but it was missing the larger piece, so I started studying the interactions students had with people in these localities and the ways in which they used the language in identity development and relationships,” she said. “What does it mean to be a foreigner? How do you construct and express yourself? Students are building a transnational identity and developing the context to express who they are, rather than just conveying meaning.”
Studying abroad provides students with nuanced, different ways to respond to concepts like identity and relationships. For a few weeks or months, their new day-to-day reality provides an entirely different context for using the language, Diao said.
“It’s well established that when you study abroad, you become more fluent within a narrow linguistic definition. You’re able to produce more in the language, and that’s important. But I’m interested in the real-life language usage and the discovery of new ways of being and becoming,” she said. “Different languages provide different systems of meaning making. There are ways to express yourself and your identity in one language that might be different in other languages.”
In the classroom, instructors tend to focus on “proper” language use, not teaching a lot of sociolinguistic variations that can be difficult to explain without seeing the context. For example, Diao took students on a Shanghai study abroad program to places like a “marriage market” where parents would try match-making for their adult children, or to visit college entrance exam sites.
“Study abroad is when students discover all these different ways of speaking and these varieties of linguistic constructions,” Diao said. “There are lots of nuanced ways of speaking that students learn when they are studying abroad and you see a kind of imagining of their future selves that’s a part of the language learning. That’s something that happens on top of the experience of travel, but it’s not something you’d get as a tourist.”
For Janice McGregor, Associate Professor in the Department of German Studies, an academic interest in study abroad language learning came out of her own experiences as a student, interning three summers abroad and living with a host family. For her dissertation, she examined how deeply people get involved in the local community during a temporary stay.
At the U of A, she’s led summer trips with students in the Arizona Summer Study in Leipzig program, and turned her research toward what kinds of strategies students are using in their short-term programs with their peers in language learning.
“Sometimes that’s thought of as a negative since they’re associating with English speakers, but what I would see is students would be more playful with German because they have these other students with them who are also engaged with learning German,” she said. “I’d see students playing with language based around their shared experience and engaging with multilingualism even in these short-term programs.”
McGregor has also begun researching student health and well-being in the context of study abroad, seeing how students manage issues of homesickness, illness and creating healthy routines in a new environment. Amidst other challenges, a feeling of acceptance and belonging can be crucial in seeing the value in both the travel experience and their progress in learning the language.
“In a four-week program it can be as simple as getting acknowledged as a regular somewhere and getting this brief sense of belonging,” she said. “In the classroom, you get a lot of feedback from peers and instructors and that prepares you to see yourself stepping into this place. When you are there, there are these moments of recognition, even if they’re only a year into German study, when it’s quite thrilling to recognize things and pick up these exchanges.”