Language Assistantships and Student Exchange: A comparison of students

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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
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LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND SOCIAL NETWORKS ABROAD
PROJECT.

• LANG-SNAP (2011-2013)

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Overview

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

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LANG-SNAP Background information

• 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.

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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.

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Preliminary findings to be discussed today

• 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 80
• 64 oral interviews in the TL
• 16 reflective interviews in English

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LANG-SNAP Data collection period
When Test
May 2011 Pretest (Southampton)
November 2011 Abroad 1
March 2012 Abroad 2
June 2012 Abroad 3
October 2012 Post-test 1 (Southampton)
February 2013 Post-test 2 (Southampton)
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LANG-SNAP Data collection period
When Test
May 2011 Pretest (Southampton)
November 2011 Abroad 1
March 2012 Abroad 2
June 2012 Abroad 3
October 2012 Post-test 1 (Southampton)
February 2013 Post-test 2 (Southampton)
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Emerging themes from oral interviews
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YOU WONT LEARN MUCH SPANISH IF...

• The impact of the chosen scheme on language
  development during residence abroad.

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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

... 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, 0528)
... because I think that if I live in a
smaller town then I will learn more Spanish
because there wouldnt be any English speaking
people to talk to (O170aNTV, 1102)
... normally English students live with other
English people, but I dont 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, 1218)
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Samples obtained from the Oral Interviews
conducted in May 2011 (Prestest)
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?

• Erasmus

Im 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,
0417)
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, 0838)
... 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, 0358)
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I WOULDNT HAVE LEARNED MUCH IF...

• Illustrative examples extracted for the oral
  interviews
• (Pretest, Rounds 1 and 2)

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Samples obtained from the Oral Interviews
conducted in May 2011 (Prestest)
Samples obtained from the Oral Interviews
conducted in Nov 2011 and March 2012 (Rounds 1
and 2).
... I find it difficult to understand when
they are speaking and thats 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 its difficult to make friends with them
(TAO161bNTV, 1102)
If I had chosen to be an Erasmus student I think
I would be with the Erasmus all the time, but
you wont learn Spanish if you speak English all
day. So I dont think my Spanish would have
improved as much as it has today (TA O167bNTV,
1839)
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 its hard... in
another class the majority are Erasmus and
English is... People want to talk to you in
English and its hard (Er O168cNTV, 1617)
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YOU WONT LEARN ANY SPANISH IF...

• But... wont you?

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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)

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Elicited Imitation
EI Pretest Time 2
TA mean SD 82.86 10.38 100.29 5.99
UNI mean SD 81.78 10.64 102.44 6.02
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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.

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Languages spoken with Social Network (SN)
membersRound 1 (November 2011)
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Time 2
Languages spoken with Social Network (SN)
membersRound 2 (March 2012)
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Language Assessments
Type Language Focus When
Elicited imitation General Proficiency Pretest, 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 interview Fluency, accuracy, complexity Tenses Lexical richness All
Vocabulary recognition test Receptive vocabulary Pretest, Abroad 3, Posttest 1
Grammaticality judgement task Subjunctive Abroad 1, Abroad 3
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EI Results, case-by-case comparison
Scheme Participant Pretest Round 2 Change
UNI 168 59 101 42
TA 161 72 105 33
TA 174 77 102 25
TA 151 73 97 24
UNI 164 82 105 23
UNI 166 80 102 22
UNI 165 92 113 21
UNI 169 74 92 18
UNI 172 82 100 18
UNI 156 83 100 17
TA 167 88 104 16
UNI 163 94 109 15
TA 170 83 93 10
UNI 152 90 100 10
TA 180 85 93 8
TA 173 102 108 6
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Time 2
Languages spoken with Social Network (SN)
membersRound 2 (March 2012)
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Top five people students report they interact
the most with
English Spanish Mixture
168 (ch 44) 3 2 -
152 (ch 10) 1 4 -
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DISCUSSION

• Thank you for listening.
• P.Romero_at_soton.ac.uk

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