A Critical Reading of Research

Celeste Kinginger

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Language Learning and Study Abroad

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Language Learning and Study Abroad

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Language Learning and Study Abroad A Critical Reading of Research The Pennsylvania State University

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Celeste Kinginger

© Celeste Kinginger 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–54924–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kinginger, Celeste, 1959– Language learning and study abroad : a critical reading of research / Celeste Kinginger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–54924–1 (alk. paper) 1. Second language acquisition. 2. Language and languages— Study and teaching—Foreign speakers. 3. Foreign study. 4. Intercultural communication. I. Title. P118.2.K53 2009 418.0071—dc22 2009013641 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

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To Jon and Sam

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Contents

List of Tables

viii ix

1 Situating Language Learning in Study Abroad

1

2 Measuring Language Acquisition

29

3 Domains of Communicative Competence

69

4 Communicative Settings for Language Learning Abroad

114

5 Language Socialization and Identity

154

6 Interpreting Research on Language Learning in Study Abroad

205

Notes

224

References

225

Name Index

242

Subject Index

246

vii

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Acknowledgments

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1

Assessment of proficiency development Assessment of fluency development Assessment of listening comprehension Assessment of reading and writing Assessment of grammatical competence Research on speech acts Studies of discourse competence Studies of sociolinguistic competence Research on communicative settings for language learning 5.1 Research on language socialization and identity

viii

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42 50 59 62 73 84 92 103 116 157

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List of Tables

I would like to thank my colleagues and students in the Department of Applied Linguistics, the Department of French and Francophone Studies, and the Center for Language Acquisition at the Pennsylvania State University for their support of my research and for many inspiring conversations about language learning. I am indebted to David Block and to Aneta Pavlenko for their invaluable comments on the manuscript. My thanks also go to Jill Lake, Priyanka Pathak, and Melanie Blair at Palgrave/Macmillan for taking on this project and seeing it to completion with expertise and humane professionalism. The preparation of this book was partially supported by a grant of sabbatical leave from the College of Liberal Arts at the Pennsylvania State University and by a grant from the US Department of Education (CFDA 84.229, P229A020010) to the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER) at the Pennsylvania State University. However, the contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education and one should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.

ix

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Acknowledgments

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1

Preamble In his 1986 autobiographical novel L’étudiant étranger (The Foreign Student), the French journalist and cineaste Philippe Labro recreates and embellishes his college study abroad experience. During the mid-1950s the novel’s 18-year-old protagonist leaves France for a year to become an exchange student in the United States. His destination is a rural college for ‘gentlemen’ located in central Virginia where the White population clings both to antebellum customs of discreet propriety and to its legacy of racial prejudice and segregation. Alternately terrified and thrilled to the core, the young man is plunged into an alternative universe where everything seems new to him, from language, to modes of social organization, to colors of the natural landscape. Eager to blend in, he decides that the best way to learn will be to participate as actively as possible while pretending to have understood not only words, but also gestures, clothing, grooming, flavors, and quotidian pursuits. He shortly discovers that the meanings of linguistic signs are richly intertwined with social convention, sensual experience, and implicit ideologies of gender and race. He gradually discovers, for example, that the word date, as a verb, corresponds to an elaborate, carefully scripted ritual involving drive-in movies and fraternity parties, accessible only to those who own or can borrow a car. In learning to use this word, Labro’s autobiographical ‘I’ profits by a legitimate place in the local world of dating, as well as the desire for this participation. He discovers not only the word’s grammatical functions but also some scripts for the corresponding activity and the implications of variation from those scripts, including the consequences of rule violation, and script variants like blind date and steady date. 1

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Situating Language Learning in Study Abroad

Language Learning and Study Abroad

Understanding the ritual itself is not enough, however: he must also grasp such subtleties as the paradox of 1950s’ moral codes according to which one’s date (the noun) should be a good girl: maximally enticing but virtuously abstemious, tantalizing but inaccessible. Over time, the meaning of such a word might develop multi-sensory levels, linked not only to knowledge of etiquette and proper dress but also to the flavor of certain foods, such as popcorn, hamburgers, or Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and to a broad array of ‘prior texts’ (Becker 1988), including the portrayal of dating and romance in the pop music of the 1950s (e.g., Marty Robbins’ 1957 ‘A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation’ or Danny and the Juniors’ 1955 ‘At the Hop’). In the end, the word might assume a rich emotional resonance associated with specific events in the author’s memory (Kramsch 2006a). Along the way, the foreign student often violates codes whose very existence he does not suspect. At first, these infractions are relatively minor, as when he is brought before a peer disciplinary council (The Assimilation Committee), suspected of failing to smile with adequate sincerity when greeting strangers on campus. Later, his choices lead him far from his initial innocence, and toward shocking realizations of the economic and racial inequities characterizing the American south prior to the civil rights movement. A generation after Labro, as a bookish 19-year-old college student born in central Virginia, I went to France, joining the many American participants in the then traditional Junior Year Abroad. I would leave behind the leafy oasis of Antioch College, having cultivated a sincere smile and an appropriately radical political outlook, and would abandon routine walking meditations on existentialism in the company of my professors. Having dutifully chanted the dialogues in the first-year textbook, put on plays more ridiculous than sublime in high school French class, then crept one-by-one through the pages of Camus’ L’Etranger, leaning heavily on my bilingual dictionary, my plan was to learn French. Apart from knowing that this effort would involve reading more books and talking, I had precious few ideas about how this plan would work. I didn’t know at the time that learning another language would involve learning how to live otherwise: how to dress, how to eat, walk, gesture, and navigate within institutions. Like Labro, I entered the scenes of my first year in France with only vague awareness of my own preconceptions, and I look back on that year as a time not only of considerable malaise but also of continual discovery. Madame Lunes, proprietress of the small family farm where I satisfied Antioch’s cooperative work assignment, taught me to

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manufacture goat cheese, to choose the right market piglet, to perfect a vinaigrette, to endure driving uninhibited by the speed limit in a rattling Deux Chevaux, and above all, to talk about family, love, food, religion, and politics. Later on, mainly by way of shared interest in chamber music performance, I acquired friends at school who oversaw my apprenticeship in youth culture and language, patiently shepherding me through the argot-laden pages of their comic books and correcting my pompous, misplaced, or archaic vocabulary. In the classroom, I encountered literary language in a context where the rules for interaction were clearly very different from those in force at Antioch. On the street, in the news, and in diverse conversational settings, I began to recognize that despite lingering echoes of May 1968, history’s yield of bigotry, intolerance, and social inequity was as much in evidence in Montpellier as it had ever been in Virginia. My first study abroad experience, unlike that of Labro’s protagonist, took place under the aegis and direct guidance of my college and its programs: work/study, an agreement with the university in Montpellier, and finally the Paris Seminar run by my beloved late professor, Anna Otten, and intended to acquaint Antioch students personally with Parisian writers and artists such as Roland Barthes, Alain RobbeGrillet, Eugene Ionesco, Nathlie Sarraute, and Fernando Botero. The program appears in retrospect to have been extremely well designed for my purpose. I returned to my studies in the United States with communicative resources in French to match a wide variety of circumstances, because my French-mediated experiences had extended from herding goats and shoveling manure to discussing the viability of poststructuralist approaches to literary analysis. Although attaining this competence had required striking out on my own most of the time, as a member of the cohort from my college, I had also interacted continuously with other Americans and had certainly noticed that my fellow Antioch students, a motley crew of poets, scientists, activists, and magicians, would have been extremely difficult to classify under any rubric, including ‘language learner.’ L’étudiant étranger is a work of fiction based – perhaps loosely – on Labro’s life experiences as a young Frenchman in Virginia, shaped by its narrator’s perspective of time, his mature wisdom, experience, and aesthetic goals. My own reflections on study abroad as a young Virginian in France are similarly crafted by the benefit of hindsight and current intent. Neither of these narratives are works of second-language research, yet at the beginning of a book about language learning in study abroad, it is well to be reminded that language learning cannot

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Situating Language Learning in Study Abroad

Language Learning and Study Abroad

be easily or unproblematically extracted from the whole of lived experience. Autobiographical accounts, literary or otherwise, serve as a vivid reminder that language learners are unique people, ‘not just communicators and problem solvers, but whole persons with hearts, bodies, and minds, with memories, fantasies, loyalties, identities’ (Kramsch 2006b: 251). In reading these accounts and recalling personal experience, we remember that language learning is tied to concrete historical and sociocultural settings and the vast multiplicity of semiotic resources within them (Lantolf and Pavlenko 2001). Language learning is about lexical, grammatical, phonological, or pragmatic forms, to be sure, but it is also about flavors and colors, sights and sounds, in short, embodied experience of the world (van Lier 2008).

Introduction This book outlines the current state-of-the-art in research on language learning abroad, acquainting readers with the variety of approaches in the contemporary literature through scrutiny of the advantages and drawbacks of each. An enhanced awareness of the relationship between study abroad and language learning is much to be desired, for teachers, program designers, researchers, policy makers, parents, and students. Language-teaching professional folklore frames the sojourn abroad as the highlight of academic careers, a time when students emerge from classroom decorum and observe that a foreign language need not always be interpreted as a bloodless academic object, severed from its cultural origin and habitat (Lantolf 2007). Often basing their evaluation on their own transformative experiences, teachers expect students abroad to discover language as a medium of expressive delight and a key to world of difference. However, even if study abroad is a key feature of many language programs, dispassionate evaluation of its effects remains a rare practice. Few programs make the effort to integrate the sojourn abroad into their curriculum (Coleman 1998; Wilkinson 2005). Often, study abroad is taken not only as a learning environment inherently superior to the classroom but also as an excuse not to teach languages (Schneider 2001). From the perspective of pedagogy, then, a clearer understanding of how study abroad functions in the development of students’ language ability might assist in developing reasoned approaches to program design. Among researchers interested in language learning, particularly in academic settings, study abroad represents a compelling but extremely thorny series of questions. A sojourn abroad is normally considered to

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be a crucial step in the development of ability to use a language in a range of communicative settings. The design of research on language learning abroad, however, confronts the investigator with a bewildering array of variable features, from the identities, motives, or desires of the learner to the range of chance or deliberate encounters presenting opportunities to learn. Students abroad potentially observe, participate, and communicate in classrooms, homes, personal relationships, service learning, or commercial interactions. Study abroad programs have varying objectives, academic foci, and expectations for student activities. Students abroad may be received with warmth, enthusiasm, and patient assistance, or they may find their presence noted with indifference or even with hostility. They may or may not position themselves wholly or in part as language learners. Nevertheless, researchers in applied linguistics and language education have demonstrated considerable interest in study abroad, especially in the years following the publication of Freed’s landmark edited volume, Second Language Acquisition in a Study Abroad Context (1995a). Numerous projects have explored the language-related outcomes well as the qualities of student experience abroad. The range of approaches characterizing this sub-field of applied linguistics now warrants critical review, to inspire creativity and ensure caution in future research. For policy makers and the public, questions about study abroad often have to do with justifying investment of time and financial resources. Politicians want to know how the common good is served through support of students’ sojourns in other countries, and parents want to know what is gained and what is lost when their children study abroad. In the United States, for example, opinions may be formed not only by the findings of research, but also by a ‘dominant’ policy discourse (Gore 2005) according to which education of true quality can only be obtained at home, or by sensationalist reports of students whose time abroad is spent in rigorous avoidance of study while they bar hop and practice extreme sports with other Americans (Feinberg 2002). It is challenging to sort through the conflicting messages of detractors and supporters of study abroad, and to arrive at a reasonably clear conclusion. In many policy documents or in advertising, meanwhile, study abroad is portrayed as offering numerous benefits, with language learning typically playing a relatively minor part. Students who go abroad, it is claimed, develop greater personal maturity, first-hand knowledge of other lands and peoples, commitment to civic engagement, and intercultural awareness fostering mutual understanding among

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Situating Language Learning in Study Abroad

Language Learning and Study Abroad

nations. Although language is downplayed or made transparent in these documents, as if it were an ancillary skill incidental to other goals, experts on international education such as Falk and Kanach (2002) argue convincingly that foreign language competence is a key prerequisite for intercultural communicative competence and international understanding. It follows from this argument that understanding how languages are learned in study abroad will offer considerable guidance in assessing the general worth of these educational experiences. Much depends, as well, on whether language is understood only as a practical skill or more broadly as social practice and ‘a personal stake which extends one’s identity’ (Murphy-Lejeune 2002: 104). This book explores a variety of research traditions in the research on language learning abroad, including measurement of proficiency, investigation of language acquisition, ethnographic inquiry, and approaches to identity and language socialization. Such a project can aspire to inclusiveness, but not to exhaustiveness. Major exemplars of prominent approaches to research are examined, but I cannot claim to discuss each and every relevant study. Along the way, nonetheless, the reader will discover an emerging research-derived knowledge base useful for the design and assessment of study abroad programs and for projects aiming to promote meaningful student experiences. The reading supplied here is ‘critical’ in the classic scholarly sense. That is, it attempts to move beyond the face value of knowledge presentation and toward recognition of the historical and ideological contexts shaping research agendas and knowledge representation, with the goal of deriving an informed synthesis addressing several key concerns of educators, policy makers, participants, and researchers: What are the contributions of study abroad to language learning? What can educators do to assist sojourners abroad in reaching their language-related goals? What capabilities are necessary, in the contemporary world, to foster successful, satisfying, and educationally relevant student sojourns abroad? Which aspects of language learning abroad have been adequately studied, and which remain insufficiently explored? This chapter includes three sections. The first sets the stage for the project represented in this book, defining study abroad within the larger context of international education and student mobility, and contrasting it with the related phenomena of migration, on the one hand, and tourism, on the other. The second briefly explores policy issues and demographic facts about international education in the United States, Europe, and Japan, whose student citizens participate in study programs abroad in considerable numbers. This discussion shows that even if a

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Situating Language Learning in Study Abroad

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uniform baseline definition of study abroad were to be achieved, the educational meaning of this pursuit, and the research accompanying it, can nevertheless vary considerably from one geopolitical or national context to the next. Finally, the chapter turns to the recent history of second-language research shaping scholars’ agendas in study abroad contexts and to an overview of the book.

If scholars have been mobile throughout the history of scholarship, in the contemporary era of social and economic globalization, study abroad is becoming ever more difficult to apprehend in its entirety. Since the 1950s in particular, cross-border education has expanded in every form. Observers witness annual increases and innovations in program mobility, and record numbers of students enrolled in study abroad programs each year. Over the past three decades, there has a been fourfold increase in the number of students enrolled outside their country of citizenship; from 0.61 million worldwide in 1975 to 2.73 million in 2005 (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 2007). In its putative benefits for language expertise and intercultural awareness, student mobility has become a priority of policy makers throughout the world. More students are going abroad for a wider range of purposes, and within a broader selection of programs, than ever before. For James Coleman (2006), the first, and somewhat disarming, challenge in defining study abroad is to discern how it is named. Coleman discovered many nomenclatures circulating in the published literature, including: ‘study abroad,’ ‘student mobility,’ ‘residence abroad,’ ‘in-country study,’ ‘overseas language immersion,’ ‘séjour à l’étranger,’ ‘estancia al extranjero,’ ‘auslandsaufenthalt,’ and ‘academic migration.’ Clearly, each of these terms refers in some way to education taking place outside a given student’s home country or region, but each also limits or expands this phenomenon in a specific manner. ‘Residence abroad,’ for example, highlights the value of lived experience in a way that ‘in-country study’ does not, and a ‘séjour à l’étranger’ seems less consequential, both for individuals and for societies, than ‘academic migration.’ Thus when first we encounter it, this plethora of terms suggests real differences not only in ways of organizing study abroad, but also in the concepts underlying this organization. Meanwhile, Block (2007a) noted that the literature on language learning in study abroad over-represents the experiences of students from the

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Study abroad, academic migration, and tourism

Language Learning and Study Abroad

United States and to a lesser extent, Europe and Japan, excluding many conceivable combinations of sending and receiving countries. While we learn a great deal about how US students fare in Europe or Latin America, and we read about the learning trajectories of European students during their year abroad, this literature appears to exclude, for example, African students in Europe, Asian students in Australia, or Latin American students in the United States. An initial step, then, is to define precisely what we mean by study abroad, and to situate this activity and the focus of the book with respect to the related phenomena of migration, on one hand, and tourism, on the other. A look at the larger economic and demographic picture serves at once to clarify how study abroad functions in the broader context of international education worldwide, and to shed some light on the imbalanced representation in research noted by Block. In a publication treating Internationalization and Trade in Higher Education (2004), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development1 (OECD) presented statistics on the nature and growth of ‘cross-border education’ as one issue within the wider development of educational internationalization. Cross-border education includes the mobility of people (students and teachers) as well as the mobility of educational programs and institutions. At the level of policy, the report distinguished four national approaches to cross-border education: • A mutual understanding approach affording intellectual and cultural enrichment and stimulus to academic programs and research. Such an approach is exemplified by the European Union’s ERASMUS program funding over a million student exchanges from 1987 to the present. • A revenue-generating approach promoting the services of a country’s higher education system to fee-paying students abroad in an effort to control a large share of the market. This approach has been adopted in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, which all have international agencies for the promotion of national interests in the educational marketplace. • A skilled migration approach, such as the report attributes to Germany, aiming to attract highly skilled students who may remain in the host country after their studies, thus countering the economic effects of an ageing society and stimulating academic life and research. • A capacity-building approach within which countries encourage their domestic students to study abroad in order to build or improve the quality of their home educational provisions upon their return.

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The four approaches are not to be understood as mutually exclusive, but rather to exist and to complement one another in various combinations. Identifying these approaches provides a vocabulary with which the report may then characterize both national and regional policies themselves and their occasionally unintended effects. For example, when students from a developing country promoting capacity building take up the opportunities provided in a developed country with a skilled migration approach to recruiting foreign talent, the result, known as brain drain, has more far-reaching consequences than does mere study abroad – it is in fact temporary or permanent migration. Scrutiny of the 2004 OECD report reveals global economic inequities shaping the exigencies of student mobility and the ambitions of student border crossers. For many of the Latin American, African, and Asian students whose experience appears to be excluded from the study abroad literature, cross-border education is driven less by a mutual understanding approach than by economic striving or by a dearth of opportunity for higher education at home. It is not necessarily undertaken in the context of a home institution’s design for academic enrichment but is, potentially at least, a long-term change of locale and life horizons for individual students and for whole populations of skilled professionals. This reality is reflected in the documented purpose and duration of student sojourns abroad by region of origin. Student mobility, rather than institutional mobility, represents the largest share of crossborder education as a worldwide phenomenon. Student mobility further divides into three categories: (1) full study abroad for a foreign degree or qualification; (2) study as part of an academic partnership within a home degree or a joint degree involving institutions at home and abroad; and (3) exchange programs. For students from the Asia-Pacific region, for example, the main modality of cross-border education is the acquisition of a full degree on a fee-paying basis. That is, these students often go abroad for periods of multiple years, earning degrees recognized and valued by their host countries; these degrees may either be imported back to the home country as part of capacity building or they may qualify the student to join the host country’s workforce. In Western Europe, by contrast, only 2 percent of tertiary level students were enrolled in foreign degree programs, and these students came from

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Countries emphasizing this approach include those where demand for higher education outweighs supply, such as Sri Lanka or Cyprus.

Language Learning and Study Abroad

countries such as Cyprus or Luxembourg whose educational system did not offer significant opportunity for study at the post-secondary level. The typical form of student mobility in Europe, Canada, and Mexico is a short-term program not exceeding one year in duration. In the United States, 91 percent of study abroad participants were enrolled in programs of a semester’s duration or less at the time the report was issued. In summarizing general trends in student mobility, the report emphasizes overall growth, the attraction of foreign students to OECD countries, and the particular lure of English. By 2004, international student mobility had doubled in the previous 20 years, and the OECD countries hosted the majority of the world’s foreign students (85 percent). Further, of these internationally mobile students in OECD countries, 57 percent were from outside the OECD area. Approximately half of these students were attracted to study in one of the English-speaking countries of the OECD, namely the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the United States. The number of foreign students in Australia had tripled since 1990 and multiplied more than thirteen-fold since 1980. In the United Kingdom, there were three times as many foreign students as there were in 1990, and four times as many as in 1980. In the United States, there had been over half a million new enrollments of foreign students each year since 1999 (Institute for International Education 2007). Thus, while all forms of student mobility are available in principle to all students, in practice the meaning of ‘study abroad’ varies considerably depending on student origin, destination, and ultimate goal. Students from outside the OECD usually enroll in full study abroad for a foreign degree, often in English-speaking countries. For many of these students, study abroad is migration related, particularly in destinations like the United States, where generous scholarship support at the graduate level combines with a capacity-building approach in technical fields. The OECD report of 2004 cited many examples of countries such as Sri Lanka and the Philippines, which were ‘net exporters of skilled labor,’ or of the 50 percent of Chinese and Indian doctoral students in the United States in 2000 who intended to stay upon completion of their studies (OECD 2004: 150). Thus, in the literature on language learning in study abroad, the limited representation of these students’ experience may be due to blurred boundaries between education and other, longer-term activities, and between study abroad and migration. Documentation of these students’ language-learning processes does exist in many forms within the broader literature on second-language acquisition (SLA) and the socialization of international students, but it is not necessarily identified as related primarily to study abroad alone.

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The economic perspective represented in the OECD report helps to clarify why the literature on language learning in study abroad primarily represents the experiences of students from Europe, Japan, or Englishspeaking countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia. These students enjoy relative high levels of economic privilege conveying the right to imagine a geographically stable future. While earning home-based degrees and envisaging mobility as a matter of personal or professional choice, these students may pursue intellectual growth, cultural enrichment, international awareness, and language learning through various forms of study abroad. The possibility of longer-term migration, while not excluded, is rarely the focus of such sojourns. It is, after all, within the context of deliberately temporary sojourns away from home that study abroad becomes a salient phenomenon in and of itself. Typically, then, when these students go abroad in the course of their studies they do so within short-term programs of a year or less, often as part of a local, home-based degree or qualification program. The definition of study abroad that is adopted in this book, therefore, is as follows: a temporary sojourn of pre-defined duration, undertaken for educational purposes. A study abroad experience may fulfill degree requirements or may provide enrichment within a home-based degree program, normally at the post-secondary level. Study abroad, according to this definition, also includes the cases of individuals who go to another country or region temporarily and for educational reasons, often involving language learning. This definition includes the typical experiences of European exchange students, those of Asian students who go abroad in order to learn English, and those of students from the United States, Australia, or Canada who go abroad for a variety of educational purposes, including language learning. This definition helps to situate the field under consideration and to separate it from the broader phenomenon of more explicitly migration-related student mobility. Without excluding students of any national origin, it also demonstrates that language-acquisition research on study abroad tends to focus on the largest populations of students who have recently enjoyed the luxury of sampling foreign realities within a purely educational framework. Study abroad, as defined here, exists on a continuum describing the student’s intended degree of resettling and integration into the host country. On one end of the spectrum lies migration, and on the other, tourism, including opportunities for short-term ‘vacation study abroad’ in which travel is more closely associated with leisure and entertainment than with effort and focused learning. Distinctions are blurred at

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Situating Language Learning in Study Abroad

Language Learning and Study Abroad

both ends, however. In the case of tourism, for example, much depends upon the intentions of individual students. Feinberg (2002) describes cases where short-term study abroad, although situated within an educational framework, was experienced by American students as opportunity for leisure activities such as bungee jumping and recreational drinking, enhanced by exotic backdrops. As English exerts increasing dominance worldwide, Phipps (2006), by contrast, describes the earnest endeavors of Anglophone tourist language learners, arguing for a revised vision of linguistic tourism as a mainstay of intercultural dialogue. In relation to language learning in study abroad, tourism is a state of mind influenced not only by individual proclivities but also by the value societies assign to foreign language competence as a desired outcome of travel. In his critique of the study abroad literature on language learning, Block (2007a) observes a disproportionate emphasis on the experiences of American students. While researchers do examine outcomes and qualities of study abroad by European and Asian students, in the primary English-language research databases the majority of citations referring directly to language learning and study abroad concern students from the United States. A closer look reveals that the foci adopted by researchers from various regions are shaped in part by sociopolitical history and education policy influencing the societal roles ascribed to language and language learning. For American researchers the salience of study abroad is enhanced not only by the life-transforming nature of travel from a geographically isolated country, but also by the part it may play in furthering language acquisition at relatively early stages. European research often investigates issues of intercultural awareness and adaptation for more advanced learners whose border crossing is a routine practice. Researchers examining the experiences of Japanese students abroad are primarily concerned with the acquisition of English for international communication or for academic success at home. The brief historical overviews of related language education policy and practice below illustrate the diversity of purpose represented within research on language learning abroad in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

The United States In the United States, ‘the public and policy makers have traditionally been more inward than outward-looking’ (OECD 2004: 43), and international education is not central to national educational debate. Similarly, language teaching is a marginalized pursuit that has never been in the mainstream of American education (Bernhardt 1998).

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Pavlenko (2002a) took a historiographic approach to the emergence of monolingualism in English as a symbol of national unity and identity. In the 18th and early 19th century, the United States was robustly multilingual, with educational policy and practice in support of linguistic diversity, and numerous immigrant groups maintaining their native languages for generations. However, an ideological shift took place during the Great Migration period of 1880–1924, when some 24 million immigrants arrived in the United States. This influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe aroused fears of a threat to national unity. In the wake of World War One, these fears combined with anti-German ‘hysteria and xenophobia’ (2002a: 174) to yield a climate conducive to linguistic intolerance. A new rhetoric emerged equating English proficiency with true citizenship, supported by discourses framing English as a language of high ethical and intellectual value. Multilingualism was linked to cognitive deficit, lack of patriotism, and low moral standards. The post-war period witnessed the rise of the Americanization movement, with efforts to assimilate immigrant adults and children through English and civics instruction, policies imposing English as the official language of certain states, and the restriction of foreign language instruction. Efforts were underway to protect the ‘ideological purity’ (2002a: 182) of foreign language classes by assigning them to American-born teachers, withdrawing them from elementary schools, and de-emphasizing interactive skills in favor of reading. In sum, this period gave birth to the pervasive double standard in present-day American ideologies of multilingualism: while middleclass children may be encouraged to acquire some, usually limited, proficiency in French, Spanish, or German, their immigrant peers are discouraged from maintaining their native languages and told to focus on English only. Accordingly, in the overall contemporary picture, internationalization remains marginal on many campuses and is seen as more related to the presence of foreign students and scholars than to internationalizing teaching and learning for American students. At the federal level, efforts at internationalization in the 20th century have typically been dominated by concerns about national security and economic competition. The Cold War was the impetus for the 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA), prompted by the Soviet launching of Sputnik and the perceived threat of other nations’ scientific and educational prominence. The NDEA led to considerable investment in developing language and area studies expertise, but did not lead to a sustained push toward internationalization. The Department of Education’s 1965 Title VI program

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Situating Language Learning in Study Abroad

Language Learning and Study Abroad

represented another key initiative, providing grants to institutions for the furthering of language competence and internationalization. The late 1970s and 1980s saw generalized acknowledgment of another threat, this time economic in nature, as President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on Foreign Language issued its report, Strength Through Wisdom (1979). The report linked language ability with global competition, insisting that language instruction be reformed to promote functional abilities. The Bush administration came to power with an agenda for education centered on the reform of elementary and secondary level instruction. In the years following the tragedy of September 11, 2001, however, language education has come into the limelight once again as a response to a threat. In 1991 the Department of Defense had created the National Security Education Program to support the efforts of students learning less-commonly taught languages deemed critical to the armed forces. Current efforts at the federal level include expanding the number of languages offered to include those heretofore less-commonly taught, to devise pathways toward advanced level proficiency, and to increase the number of American students who study abroad. In 2005, the Commission on the Abraham Lincoln Study Abroad Fellowship Program recommended sending at least one million American undergraduate students abroad each year. In this report, widespread participation in study abroad is described as the next major step in the evolution of US higher education, comparable to the establishment of land grant universities in the latter half of the 19th century, or to the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944 providing financial assistance to veterans pursuing higher education and thereby consolidating the postwar middle class. The report emphasizes the importance of global skill for competitiveness and national security, noting that ‘study abroad is one of the major means of producing foreign language speakers and enhancing foreign language learning’ (p. vi). Enthusiasm for this proposal was such that 2006 was proclaimed the Year of Study Abroad by unanimous Senate Resolution. Even without the Abraham Lincoln Fellowship Program, study abroad participation by American students is on the rise, although its nature is changing. According to the Institute for International Education’s (IIE’s) 2007 Open Doors Report, the most recent available statistics show that the number of US students studying abroad has increased by more than 150 percent over the past decade. In the academic year 2005– 2006, 223,534 American students went abroad on academic programs, an increase of 8.5 percent over the previous year. Meanwhile, however, the Junior Year Abroad, involving foreign language majors, has

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