Language Assistantships and Student Exchange: A comparison of students’ linguistic development during different residence abroad programmes. Patricia Romero de Mills Rosamond Mitchell Nicole Tracy-Ventura

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND SOCIAL NETWORKS ABROAD PROJECT. LANG-SNAP ( ) 2

LANG-SNAP Project: General background Emerging themes from oral interviews: o The Students’ exchange programme (Erasmus) –vs- Language Assistantships Questioning common beliefs: o Is there an activity which is ‘better’ for language development abroad? Questions risen by the mixed-methods research design Discussion 3 Overview

A research project looking into how learners’ knowledge and use of the L2 develops during a year abroad. Longitudinal research design (23 months: Pre, during and after the period of residency abroad) Participants are undergraduate students of Modern Languages, specialising in Spanish or/and French, undertaking residence abroad as part of their degree. 4 LANG-SNAP: Background information

A research project looking into how learners’ knowledge and use of the L2 develop during a year abroad. Longitudinal research design (23 months: Pre, during and after the period of residency abroad) Participants are undergraduate students of Modern Languages, specialising in Spanish or/and French, undertaking residence abroad as part of their degree. 5 LANG-SNAP: Background information

16 students (7 Teaching Assistants, 9 Erasmus*) 4 interviews per student in the TL (pre and during YA) 1 reflective interview in English (Time 3 abroad) Total number of interviews explored: oral interviews in the TL 16 reflective interviews in English 6 Preliminary findings to be discussed today

WhenTest May 2011Pretest (Southampton) November 2011Abroad 1 March 2012Abroad 2 June 2012Abroad 3 October 2012Post-test 1 (Southampton) February 2013Post-test 2 (Southampton) 7 LANG-SNAP: Data collection period

WhenTest May 2011Pretest (Southampton) November 2011Abroad 1 March 2012Abroad 2 June 2012Abroad 3 October 2012Post-test 1 (Southampton) February 2013Post-test 2 (Southampton) 8 LANG-SNAP: Data collection period

EMERGING THEMES FROM ORAL INTERVIEWS 9

“YOU WON’T LEARN MUCH SPANISH IF...” The impact of the chosen scheme on language development during residence abroad. 10

Samples obtained from the Oral Interviews conducted in May 2011 (Pretest). These are replies to the question “What activity will you be doing abroad and why did you choose it?” Teaching Assistants: *Translated into English for this presentation 11 “[...] because in this way you are surrounded by Spanish all the time, but at a university very often you are with other English-speaking people, and you will not speak Spanish if you are with other English people”* (O151aNTV, 05:28) “[...] normally English students live with other English people, but I don’t want to do that because it would be too easy to speak English every day and that is not very helpful to improve my Spanish” (O161aEDR, 12:18) “[...] because I think that if I live in a smaller town then I will learn more Spanish because there wouldn’t be any English –speaking people to talk to” (O170aNTV, 11:02)

Samples obtained from the Oral Interviews conducted in May 2011 (Prestest) Erasmus: 12 “I’m going to study at a university to maximize the opportunity to speak in the classes and things like that [...] in comparison... I think if I taught it would be mostly in English than in Spanish, so this is better for me”* (O152aNTV, 04:17) “[...] I thought about teaching, but I thought it would be more useful to speak to students of my age and go out with them and all that rather than speaking to children in English, because I can already speak English!” (O156aSSF, 03:58) “[because] I want to live in a big city... And to meet other Erasmus students and their friends in Spain... But I want to live with Spanish people... because if you only have Erasmus friends the temptation to speak only English is too big” (O163aEDR, 08:38) Samples obtained from the Oral Interviews conducted in May 2011 (Pretest). These are replies to the question “What activity will you be doing abroad and why did you choose it?”

“I WOULDN’T HAVE LEARNED MUCH IF...” Illustrative examples extracted for the oral interviews (Pretest, Rounds 1 and 2) 13

Samples obtained from the Oral Interviews conducted in May 2011 (Prestest) 14 Samples obtained from the Oral Interviews conducted in Nov 2011 and March 2012 (Rounds 1 and 2). “If I had chosen to be an Erasmus student I think I would be with the Erasmus all the time, but you won’t learn Spanish if you speak English all day. So I don’t think my Spanish would have improved as much as it has today” (TA: O167bNTV, 18:39) “I want to improve my Spanish... more... I will try to speak more Spanish at university during the day, because there are some [Spanish-speaking] people, in my classes... but there are many English and it’s hard... [in another class] the majority are Erasmus and English is... People want to talk to you in English and it’s hard” (Er: O168cNTV, 16:17) “[...] I find it difficult to understand when they are speaking and that’s something I want to improve... I think that when you are a language assistant it is more complicated than when you are an Erasmus student because you are not with Spanish students all the time.. If you work in a school you are with teachers who are older than you and it’s difficult to make friends with them ” (TA:O161bNTV, 11:02)

“YOU WON’T LEARN ANY SPANISH IF...” But... won’t you? 15

ELICITED IMITATION* Measure of general proficiency participants listen to a sentence stimulus and then repeat orally what they hear 30 items with syllable length ranging from 7 to 19 syllables 5 point scoring rubric (0-4, perfect repetition), they can score a max. of 120 points. *Borrowed from Ortega et al (in preparation) 16

Elicited Imitation 17 EIPretestTime 2 TA: mean SD UNI: mean SD

Social Networks Questionnaire Targets five contexts (Work/university, home life, general and organized free time, virtual activities) Given all three times abroad Asks about language used with each person, how they met, amount of time spent together And asks them to list the top 5 people they interact the most with. 18

Languages spoken with Social Network (SN) members Round 1 (November 2011) 19

Time 2 20 Languages spoken with Social Network (SN) members Round 2 (March 2012)

TypeLanguage FocusWhen Elicited imitationGeneral ProficiencyPretest, Abroad 2, Posttest 1 Written argumentative essay Lexical richness Fluency, accuracy, complexity Tenses All Oral narrative (picture- based) Past tense morphology Discourse structure All Oral interviewFluency, accuracy, complexity Tenses Lexical richness All Vocabulary recognition test Receptive vocabularyPretest, Abroad 3, Posttest 1 Grammaticality judgement task SubjunctiveAbroad 1, Abroad 3 21 Language Assessments

EI Results, case-by-case comparison: 22 SchemeParticipantPretestRound 2Change UNI TA TA TA UNI UNI UNI UNI UNI UNI TA UNI TA UNI TA TA

Time 2 23 Languages spoken with Social Network (SN) members Round 2 (March 2012)

24 ‘Top five’ people students report they interact the most with: EnglishSpanishMixture 168 (ch 44) (ch 10)14-

DISCUSSION Thank you for listening. 25

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