Study abroad for Anglophones: language learning through multilingual practices

Abstract

In a world of global English, study abroad today is a multilingual experience,with English frequently adopted as a medium of instruction in globalising higher education and also functioning as the most common lingua francaamong international student groups. This chapter explores the resulting challenges for English-speaking students majoring in other languages, who undertake study abroad with the desire to achieve advanced proficiency inlanguages such as Spanish, French or German. Such students have high expectations that SA will provide a naturalistic “immersion” experience in L2,to complement their classroom studies at home. However, in practice they find they must negotiate a multilingual environment, including many interlocutors keen to speak English, in order to maximise opportunities for L2 use and learning.
This chapter provides longitudinal case studies of two British languagesspecialists undertaking study abroad in France and Spain respectively. These two participants were “high gainers”, that is, they made exceptional progresswhen abroad towards advanced proficiency, compared with a larger cohort ofstudents. The chapter describes the multilingual practices of these two students when abroad, and documents the agency they displayed and the varied strategies they adopted to enter contexts of target language use and to build long-term relationships with target language speakers, so as to achieve their main goal of increased oral fluency in L2, alongside regular use ofEnglish with home social networks and local networks of international friends.

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ORCID for Rosamond Mitchell: orcid.org/0000-0003-0325-528X

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