Even Brief Stints Abroad Help Students Learn a New Language- Mandy Faretta-Stutenberg

Mandy Faretta-Stutenberg

¿Hablas español? If your answer is “No”—would you like to?

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.

Student Pairs May Be Key to Learning- Christine Malecki

CISLL affiliate Dr. Christine Malecki has a story to tell.

It starts in 1997 when Malecki was a practicing school psychologist in Iowa.

She wanted to help children learn how to write better using curriculum-based measurements (CBMs). Teachers use CBMs in their classrooms to assess students’ progress on a number of skills (reading, writing, arithmetic) fairly easily.

A CBM for writing might involve a student completing a prompt like, “One day I went for an airplane ride and…”. The teacher can score the response and keep a log of the student’s progress.

Here is where our story begins.

Malecki knew that there were different ways to score the writing CBM. A simple measure was just counting the number of words the student wrote. A more complex method would require calculating and summing scores based on grammatical accuracy or complexity (or another component of writing) across a number of words in the writing.

“The more complicated measure seemed like it would be more accurate, but it seemed cumbersome to do.” recounted Malecki.

When she joined the psychology faculty at NIU, she wondered whether the more complex scoring method was worth the effort.

Like any good scientist, she collected data. She and her graduate students timed how long it would take to score around 1,000 writing samples taken from first- through eighth-graders using both simple and complex methods.

“The more complex method took three times longer to score than the simpler method, but it only correlated more highly with standardized measures of writing for students beyond the fourth grade. Up to fourth grade, the simpler method was fine,” explained Malecki.

That finding in itself would save first- through fourth-grade teachers a lot of time grading.

But that finding wasn’t enough for Malecki.

“I remember a graduate student at the time wondering whether just having students write more often would increase writing skill,” mused Malecki. That would jibe with a lot of informal advice from professional writers—to improve your writing, just write more.

So Malecki and Jennifer Jewell, her graduate student, had students write either weekly or daily for several weeks.

Counter to the advice from professional writers, students who wrote weekly improved more than students who wrote every day.

“It was burnout. The students who wrote every day just got tired. In fact, many of them told us so in no uncertain terms in their writing samples,” laughed Malecki.

Yet the weekly writing assignment did increase writing skill, although perhaps not to the level of a professional novelist.

This gave another of Malecki’s students, Julie Alitto, an idea. Why not make a CBM assessment into an intervention? This was a fairly novel idea at the time.

So, in a new study, Alitto and Malecki had students write in one of two conditions. The practice-only condition wrote weekly in much the same way as students in the prior study. In a goal-and-feedback condition, the students were reminded about the goal to improve their writing and given feedback from their instructors.

As one might expect, giving students feedback and reminding them of their writing goals improved students’ writing skill more than just writing alone.

“We were pleased with the results, but teachers told us that it was just impractical to give feedback to each and every writing sample,” Malecki said.

Then Alitto got an idea.

Why not have students give feedback to one another?

Peer-mediated intervention (PMI) is when students give each other feedback in a structured environment.

Alitto tested the idea of using PMI to increase children’s writing skill, and her dissertation was born. In an experiment, she showed that using well-crafted worksheets, students working in pairs can give accurate feedback to their partner.

“It worked. Students’ writing improved as a function of peer-mediated intervention. I think it surprised many teachers who thought that having students grading each other was just an ‘easy way out’,’’ explained Malecki. The PMI research was published in the Journal of School Psychology by Malecki and former student Sammi Coyle, now a professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

In fact, peer-mediated intervention has caught on in the education community. Students learn by receiving and giving feedback, and teachers can catch up on sleep rather than grading late into the night.

“There is definitely more research to be done to understand the boundary conditions of when PMI works and when it doesn’t,” said Malecki. For example, does it work for all ages? What components of PMI are most instrumental for change? Does it promote social skills?

Her story is not over, but a provisional ending seems appropriate.

Peer-mediated intervention may very well be instrumental to the future of education, one suited for both face-to-face and online courses, especially with massively open online courses (MOOCS). As the old saying goes, “No one learns more than the teacher.”

If you are an instructor wishing to try PMI in your classroom, Malecki has four suggestions for you:

• Identify and target your skill of interest, 

• Teach the students the routine of how to assess each other, presumably by using clear worksheets or guides,

• Think about how to pair students. Having two low-skilled students assessing each other may be problematic, and 

• Monitor the students’ behavior. They need to be on task. If you are interested in learning more about PMI, Malecki and Coyle have a chapter in an upcoming book, Peers as Change Agents, published by Oxford University Press. It is due out next summer. 

 

 

 
About the author: Keith Millis is on CISLL’s executive board and is a professor of psychology at NIU.

Crossing Lines in the Sand with AR Sandboxes: Nicole LaDue

Nicole LaDue and student Justin Moore

How many years ago did you last play in a sandbox? 20 years ago? 40 years?

For NIU Geology Professor Dr. Nicole LaDue, it was about a year ago.

However, LaDue’s recent experiences with sand are likely different than yours from your childhood.

For one thing, her sandbox is called an augmented reality (AR) sandbox. In this high-tech sandbox, an Xbox Kinect is placed over the sand facing down.

The Xbox Kinect sensor detects different elevations of the sand and sends that information to a computer which processes the data. A program then computes a 3D representation of the sand underneath and then computes a 2D representation from that information.

“It essentially computes a dynamic topographic map of the sand as a person manipulates the sand with their hands” explains LaDue. “A projector sends that information back onto the sand.”

A topographic map is a 2D representation of a 3D world. It uses lines to represent boundaries of the terrain which have the same elevation.

How do topographic maps represent elevation?

Imagine slicing off the top meter of a large pyramid by making a horizontal cut perpendicular to the Earth. Now image tracing the outline of that object on a huge piece of paper when placed in the center. You would get a square, right?

Now imagine taking another slice a meter down from the top of our (mutilated) pyramid and again trace it on the paper. And then repeat this process until you reach the ground.

What you would see on the paper?

You would see a series of concentric squares.

The number of and distance between the lines would tell you about the pyramid’s height and steepness. For example, if the distances between squares become larger towards the outer perimeter then that would suggest that the pyramid becomes flatter towards the base, similar to the Eiffel Tower. If some squares are more ragged than others then that would indicate damage or corrosion.

Topographic maps usually contain wavy lines and circles that represent mountain ranges, valleys, glacial deposits, and many other landscapes. People use this type of map to navigate while they are hiking and to develop plans for building roads and buildings.

“Learning how to read topographic maps is very difficult. We call it the ‘spatial hurdle’” said LaDue. “It is a symbolic system which requires a specific type of literacy to understand them.”

Here enters the wonderful world of AR sandboxes.

According to LaDue, there are over 600 of the AR Sandboxes across the country, located in museums, academic centers and other places of learning. They are relatively cheap to make since all you need is 300 pounds of sand, an old Xbox Kinect sensor, a computer and a projector. UC Davis provides the design plans and the computer code for free online.

“The prevailing belief is that projecting the lines onto the sand as the student manipulates the sand helps the student learn how to read topological maps. However, several previous research studies failed to demonstrate any learning gains in the classroom. We were the first ones to find a strategy for engaging students that helps them learn with the AR Sandbox.” mused LaDue.

LaDue, her M.S. student Justin Moore, Tom Pingel (now at VaTech) and colleague Tim Shipley (Temple University) tested whether it was important to project the lines onto the sand or whether projecting them onto a regular computer monitor beside the sandbox would suffice. The project was funded in part by a CISLL PoP grant awarded to LaDue, and a NIU Student Engagement Fund Project awarded to Pingel.

In their experiment, participants were first measured on their topographic map reading skills by taking a modified version of the Topographic Map Assessment (TMA). Then they manipulated the sand, with or without the presence of the AR lines serving as feedback. In addition, one-half of the participants saw the lines projected onto the sand versus a monitor. Then all participants once again took the TMA.

“Most groups saw improvement on the TMA. Surprisingly, however, having the lines projected on to the monitor produced larger learning gains than when they were projected onto the sand. This was exciting to learn because in all instances of AR sandboxes that I know of, the lines are projected onto the sand” marveled LaDue.

Why would projecting the lines onto a monitor be better than projecting them onto the sand?

“Essentially, the monitor helps because it is closer to a real topographic map than having lines projected onto the sand. They are both 2D representations” said LaDue.

Their results suggest that to help students learn topographic maps, the 600 or so AR sandboxes should display the lines onto a monitor in addition to the sand. “Students are excited to play with the sand and see the lines move in real time. But learning happens when they see how the mountains they build in the sand become a topographic map on the computer screen”, said LaDue.

In essence, cool toys can get people engaged with science, but keeping the game close to the learning outcome is what will make the toys educational.

LaDue hopes to replicate the study in a classroom and with a larger sample size.

“I credit being part of an interdisciplinary team for this project” said LaDue.

So next time you are playing in a sandbox, imagine those lines. Who knows, perhaps you will learn how to read a topographic map.