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| Mandy Faretta-Stutenberg |
Learning a new language opens up a whole new world of places, friends, experiences, and stories.
But we all know that learning a new language is not easy. That is why the courageous among us who do want to learn a new language often enroll in a foreign language (FL) course. The nice thing about taking a FL course is that you will most certainly learn—provided you pay attention in class, do the homework, and practice, of course. Watching foreign films over and over again with crossed fingers simply may not cut it.
But conventional wisdom says that the best way to learn a new language is to speak it every day with native speakers, surrounded by the language—that is, in an immersion setting.
Taking a three-hour-a-week course at your local college or university is likely not enough. Many students seeking “fluency” in a second language enroll in a study-abroad program, in which they take FL courses in a country where that language is spoken.
According to Dr. Mandy Faretta-Stutenberg, director of the Spanish Basic Language Program at NIU and FL learning researcher, many factors contribute to whether students will learn more studying abroad than studying at home. Moreover, it may be the case that study abroad impacts certain aspects of language development more than others.
“The research shows students who study abroad experience significant learning gains in measures of fluency—things like rate of speech and number of pauses—and also in pronunciation,” explained Faretta-Stutenberg.
However, according to Faretta-Stutenberg, the existing research is limited in two important ways.
The first is that the effect of immersion on the full spectrum of language learning is not well understood.
“Although fluency and pronunciation have been studied, very few studies have measured accuracy with regards to grammatical precision. For instance, do students who study abroad use verb tenses or other agreement structures accurately? Another understudied area is complexity. Students may be speaking more quickly, but are they using more complex or advanced structures than students who study a FL in their home country?” said Faretta-Stutenberg.
She argues that it is important to study the full gamut of language skills—fluency, accuracy, and complexity—because there are trade-offs between them. For example, someone might have high fluency but low accuracy. Someone else might be highly accurate but slow. If a researcher does not include the full range of skills in a single study then those trade-offs are not documented, and our understanding of the role of learning context in language development will be incomplete.
The second limitation of the existing research is that studies have been based primarily on study-abroad programs that last between a semester and a year. However, Faretta-Stutenberg points out that around 60% of study-abroad programs in the United States are classified as “short-term”—around 3-8 weeks in length—which falls substantially short of a semester, not to mention a full year.
In a recent study, she and her research team sought to address both of these limitations.
“We wondered whether there would be significant learning gains in a five-week study-abroad experience. Students expect that they will learn the language within that time frame but, frankly, the research has not been done,” explained Faretta-Stutenberg.
Faretta-Stutenberg collaborates with Janire Zalbidea at Temple University, and with Bernard Issa and Harriet Bowden at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
Working with Drs. Issa and Bowden, Faretta-Stutenberg set out to find out what students learn when they study abroad for five weeks in Spain. Because initial proficiency and experience with a language are important predictors of whether or not students experience learning gains, students were divided into two groups. Students in one group only had two semesters of Spanish under their belt, whereas students in the other group had taken six semesters before they studied abroad.
Both before departing and upon their return to the U.S., students in both groups completed a version of the “elicited imitation task.” In the task, students listen to sentences in Spanish and repeat them aloud to the best of their ability. The sentences become increasingly longer and more complex, and learner accuracy is scored using a rubric, which results in an independent measure of overall proficiency.
Once the students arrived in Spain, they were tested using a grammaticality judgment task and a lexical decision task. The first required the students to judge whether sentences were grammatically correct and the second required a judgment of whether a series of letters formed a true word in Spanish. They were tested again on these measures right before they came home.
“These tests measured various aspects of accuracy. The grammaticality judgment task measured students’ sensitivity to violations of morphosyntax, while the lexical decision task measured their word knowledge. We were interested in going beyond measures of fluency in order to contribute to our understanding of the linguistic impacts of study abroad,” elaborated Faretta-Stutenberg.
Using hierarchical regression, the researchers held constant initial scores on the grammaticality judgment and lexical decision tasks to determine whether performance on elicited imitation pre-departure would predict learning gains on those tasks.
When they saw the results, Faretta-Stutenberg was stunned. “I was skeptical whether we would see learning gains in such a small amount of time, but we did. It was exciting!” she exclaimed.
They found that early-stage learners (the two-semester students) showed significant gains on both grammar and word knowledge, whereas the later-stage learners only showed significant gains on word knowledge.
“The different types of gains in the two groups probably reflected the focus of language instruction in the courses they were taking over there,” explained Faretta-Stutenberg.
Although the study found significant learning gains, Faretta-Stutenberg emphasizes that there is a lot of variability among learners and there are several factors at play.
For example, her research has found that greater reported use of the target language while abroad predicts gains in some language abilities. “This relationship between using the language and language gains supports the claim that immersion may increase learning—but also indicates that learner actions play an important role,” said Faretta-Stutenberg.
Faretta-Stutenberg is now focusing on other research questions, such as how the study-abroad experience impacts learning once students return to their home universities, and how long the learning effects in different domains last.
As for the rest of us, we might feel a bit better pulling out our checkbooks to pay for a five-week study-abroad experience. According to Faretta-Stutenberg’s research, it is likely that we (or our loved ones) can learn more of a language in a little over a month than you’d think.
¡Excelente!
About the author: Keith Millis is on CISLL’s executive board and is a professor of psychology at NIU.
