The Art of Teaching Spanish: Second Language Acquisition from Research to Praxis

6 The Effects of Study Abroad and Classroom Contexts on the Acquisition of Spanish as a Second Language: From Research to Application

6 The Effects of Study Abroad and Classroom Contexts on the Acquisition of Spanish as a Second Language From Research to Application Barbara Lafford Arizona State University Joseph Cdllentine Northern Arizona University S tudy-abroad (SA)contexts have traditionally been assumed by language professionals , school administrators, and students (and their parents) to be the best environments in which to acquire a foreign language and understand its culture. In the United Kingdom the "year abroad" had its origin in the "grand tour" of Europe by aristocratic children of means, who spent time abroad to attain the level of cultural knowledge (of Western civilization) that their status required. For many years American university administrators and foreign language instructors believed that a "junior year abroad" experience living with host families from the target culture would help students broaden their cultural horizons and become "fluent" speakers of the target language (L2), with more improved L2 pronunciation , grammar (morphosyntactic) usage, vocabulary knowledge, and discursive abilities than those possessed by learners who acquired the target language in the classroom at home.1 These assumptions were substantiated by Carroll's (1967) widelycited study,which looked at the language skills of 2,782 college seniors who went abroad. Carroll found that even a short duration abroad (touring or summer) had a positive effect on foreign language (PL) proficiency. Today,study-abroad experiences are still encouraged in the United States, as evidenced by the fact that 160,920 students went abroad in 2003 (NAFSA 2003).Moreover, in the United Kingdom a study-abroad experience has been obligatory for language majors for the last thirty years. Recently, assumptions about the benefits of an SAexperience have been challenged by Meara (1994) and Coleman (1996), who noted weaknesses in SAresearch in the 1960s to 1980s. Freed (1995a) also noted methodological shortcomings of empirical studies on study abroad during the same period: small size (N) of informant pool or short duration of treatment period, the lack of a control group, and extensive use of only test scores to measure gains.More controlled empiricalstudies on the effects of the SA experience on the development of learners' interlanguage systems appeared in earnest in the 1990s. Freed (1995a, 1998) noted that most research carried out on SA data from several languages (French,Spanish, Russian, Japanese) still confirmed old assumptions about the benefit of study-abroad experiences on the SLAprocess; however , some "surprising results" also came out of this research, especially regarding the lack of gain on measures of grammatical competence in learners who had studied abroad (see Collentine and Freed 2004). This chapter critically examines the research on the development ofinterlanguage systems of learners of Spanish as a second language (SSL) in study-abroad and class103 104 Lafford and Collentine room ("at-home," or AH),contexts. Even though, as Freed has noted in various forums (1995a, 1998), it is generally assumed in educational circles that some sort of immersion setting—be it intensive domestic immersion (IDI) or study abroad— offers superior learning conditions over the domestic, at-home learning environment , the research on Spanish SLAto date has shown advantages for SAcontexts on some measures (e.g., oral proficiency, fluency, pronunciation,lexical acquisition, narrative and discursive abilities) while finding that learners in AH contexts are either equal or superior to their SAcounterparts in other areas (e.g., grammatical and pragmatic abilities). In order to explore how the results of this research could be applied to the teaching of Spanish as a second/foreign language in SA and AH contexts and to the improvement of various aspects of study-abroad programs, we first reviewresearch that has been carried out on the acquisition of Spanish in study-abroad and classroom contexts and then comment on methodological factors that could affect and/or limit the generalizability of the findings of these studies. Weconclude with thoughts about possible programmatic and classroom applications of this research and suggestions for future avenues of inquiry on this topic. 1.0 Review of SA Research The study-abroad literature on the acquisition of Spanish is, in large part, reflective of the general findings on the efficacy of study abroad to date in the SLAliterature (see Freed 1995a, 1998; Collentine and Freed 2004).2 It is also reflective of this literature in terms of its methodological shortcomings. Collentine and Freed (2004),who examine the literature on SLAin study-abroad, intensive-domestic-immersion and at-home settings, surmise that, while the data presented to date are scant in comparison to the corpus available on SLAas a whole...