Browsing by Subject "Study abroad"
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Item Effects of a study abroad teacher training program on the language, identity, affect, and intercultural competence of Korean teachers of English(2011-05) Choe, Yoonhee; Garza, Thomas J.; Schallert, Diane L.; Horwitz, Elaine K.; Borich, Gary D.; Kelm, Orlando R.This study investigated the linguistic, affective, and intercultural outcomes of a four-week study abroad program for Korean teachers of English offered through a U.S. southwestern university. In an effort to understand better what the 42 participants experienced during their study abroad, mixed methods including quantitative and qualitative data analysis, were used. To measure the participants‟ linguistic development, pretest and posttest measures of Listening, Reading, Structure, Speaking, and Writing were administered by the study abroad program. Also, participants responded to Self- Assessment questionnaires developed by the National Language Service Corps that asked them to assess the degree to which their reading, speaking, and listening had improved. The participants‟ daily journal entries were collected throughout the program, and some of the participants were interviewed at the beginning, at the middle, and at the end of the program on a volunteer basis. For the quantitative data analysis, the pretest and posttest scores of each measure were statistically compared by using MANOVA with follow-up ANOVA tests. Except for the reading scores, the other four measures showed significant improvement from pretest to posttest. For the Self-Assessment questionnaire, most participants checked only a few items as having improved. Interestingly, a few perceived that they had become less able to do some of the listening and speaking items over the program. These findings can be explained as resulting from overestimation before this program or as a result of increase in self-monitoring processes during the program. Through the constant comparison method (Strauss & Corbin, 1998), four themes emerged from analysis of the qualitative data. First, many participants were motivated to improve their English proficiency and increase authentic contacts with local people, with various sources shaping their motivation. Second, they increased their awareness of cultural and linguistic differences between the United States and Korea. Third, some participants showed a feeling of resistance to the dominant culture represented by native English-speaking instructors of the program. Fourth, at the end of the program, many showed improved intercultural competence. Results provide some theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, and policy implications for study abroad researchers, participants, and program instructors.Item The future in the lives of Turkish international sojourners studying in America : the role of future time perspectives and possible selves in explaining motivation to learn English(2013-08) Uslu Ok, Duygu; Schallert, Diane L.Previous research using future time perspective or possible selves frameworks provided evidence that learners with definite and elaborate goals, and future self-guides are more motivated in school tasks (Reeve, 2009; Yowell, 2000), exert more effort, demonstrate persistence, and show greater performance (De Volder & Lens, 1982; Lens et al., 2002; Simons et al., 2000), and learners with positive possible selves were better able to face failure, demonstrated better performance, had higher levels of self-esteem, showed more persistence on tasks, and depicted greater motivation (Cross & Markus, 1994; Oyserman et al., 2004; Unemori et al., 2004). The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of future orientation constructs, future time perspective and possible selves, on Turkish college level learners' motivation to learn English and their identity construction, and how future projections of themselves as L2 users (the ideal L2 self, the ought-to L2 self, and feared L2 self) impacted their motivation to learn English and their identities. A total of 299 Turkish graduate students studying in the United States participated in the study. Also, this study examined the extent to which adding a measure of the feared L2 self construct contributed to explaining motivation to learn English and identity construction. The data were collected via surveys and interviews, and they were analyzed quantitatively, using qualitative data for triangulation. Findings suggested that the L2 motivational self-system (Dornyei, 2005, 2009) contributed to explaining Turkish learners' motivation to learn English and their oriented identities. Also, adding a feared L2 self variable to measures of the L2 motivational self system could help explain learners' identity construction but not their language learning motivation. In addition, future time perspective connectedness and value were not useful in explaining the L2 motivation, but future connectedness was found to be related to the ideal L2 self and feared L2 self, and valuing the future goals was related to the ought-to L2 self. Qualitative data showed that learners presented combination of several identities, including national and oriented. They imagined themselves as professional and successful English users, and their L2 related worries included losing their native language and being seen as "assimilated" or as "showing off" individuals.Item Reading, writing, roaming : the student abroad in Arab women's literature(2012-05) Logan, Katie Marie; El-Ariss, Tarek; Cullingford, Elizabeth“Reading, Writing, Roaming: The student abroad in Arab women’s literature” details new developments in a sub-genre of Arabic travel literature, the study abroad narrative. An increasing number of female writers, and particularly female writers born after the colonial period, study in Europe and write about their experiences in memoirs or fictionalized accounts. Their intervention in the genre offers alternative modes of cultural interaction to the binaries of power detailed in earlier narratives. They suggest a move away from earlier texts such as Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, where the binary between colonizer and colonized is inverted rather than demolished. The protagonists of Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma and Somaya Ramadan’s Leaves of Narcisuss deconstruct this binary by creating specific spaces of multiplicity and heterogeneity. These spaces can be physical, as is the cottage in which Salma rents a room, or they can be literary, like the traditions of British and Arabic literature that Ramadan’s novel brings together. The women in these narratives embark on not just travel but education, developing tools of reading and writing to help them re-construct a literary and political history. The traditions and places produced by feminine narratives alter the framework of canons and spaces defined by national terms, creating what Jahan Ramazani calls transnational “alliances of style and sensibility.” Using Kristeva’s work on women’s and monumental time, I argue that women participate in specific modes of time and space, modes defined by dynamic, cyclical changes, that allow them to create these kinds of projects. Through shared living spaces and hybridized literary traditions, Faqir and Ramadan re-write the study abroad narrative to include for a greater possibility of experiences and interactions. They appropriate a structure originally available only to privileged young men and apply it to women, even to an impoverished refugee in Salma’s case. These novels encourage readers to move beyond the colonial and even the postcolonial discourse by developing new vocabularies for discussing traditions, cultures and the value of education.Item Study abroad : an intervention for athletic identity foreclosure in Black student-athletes(2015-05) Walker, Devin Leslie; Harrison, Louis, 1955-; Moore, LeonardResearchers interested in the plight of the Black student-athletes have consistently identified the need for individuals to develop other salient aspects of their identities (Brewer et al, 1993; Harrison et al, 2011; Bimper and Harrison, 2011), however, there have been few feasible solutions such as the one this paper is offering. This paper explores the specific manner in which the 1. Identity of "athlete" forecloses on Black student-athletes multidimensional identities and 2. Proposes study abroad as a potential intervention. Studying abroad has been widely regarded as a positive experience in the multi-faceted identity development of students, and is currently a service severely under-utilized by student-athletes, specifically Black males. 3. This research proposes that studying abroad could have a liberating effect on student-athletes who have spent a majority of their time, and energy on sports. Furthermore, recent research on studying abroad has identified benefits such as a boost in GPA, graduation rates, career maturity, and self-efficacy, all of which are negatives associated with athletic identity foreclosure.Item The study abroad experiences of heritage language learners : discourses of identity(2009-05) Moreno, Kirstin Heather; Abrams, ZsuzsannaThis study highlights the complexities associated with learning a heritage language (HL) abroad, specifically with regard to identity, expectations, and beliefs about language and language learning, by examining the ways that HL learners talk about themselves. These are important topics to study because perceptions of language learning have been shown to influence language acquisition in the study abroad context (Wilkinson, 1998). In addition, study abroad programs are becoming more popular and so are attempts to design language courses to meet the unique needs of HL learners. The study explores the experiences of 17 HL learners who chose to study abroad in 2007 or 2008 to improve their HL proficiency. These HL learners had at least a basic ability to comprehend and communicate in the language that their parents or grandparents speak natively, and were themselves dominant in English. The participants included 5 males and 12 females who went abroad to 14 different countries to study Spanish (7), Hebrew (1), Tigrinya (1), French (1), German (1), Korean (1), Cantonese (1), or Mandarin (4). Data collected include 17 hours of interviews both before and after the sojourns, 34 email reflections written while abroad, blog entries, and a focus group. Data were analyzed using discursive psychology, which views discourse as being variable, co-constructed, purposeful, and context-dependent. By analyzing the data to find the interpretive repertoires, ideological dilemmas, and subject positions used (Reynolds & Wetherell, 2003; Edley, 2001), a deeper understanding of studying abroad as a HL learner was attained. Findings include that the participants lack interpretive repertoires to discuss their HL and being a HL learner, used their HL as a resource to access other learning opportunities while abroad, encountered difficulties fully immersing themselves in the HL while abroad, received insufficient pre-departure support from the study abroad offices, and had backgrounds and HL learning experiences that varied considerably. The study's findings have implications for what topics to cover in classes and study abroad advising sessions that may help HL learners make decisions about where to study abroad, as well as help students process the experiences they have learning their HL and studying abroad.