Study Abroad for Multilingualism (SAM). A longitudinal, mixed-method study of international students’ language attitudes, practices and competences (Forschungsdaten)

The research project SAM investigates student mobility, which is still usually thought of and investigated in terms of a primarily monolingual focus on the TL as spoken natively, from a multilingual perspective.

For decades, student mobility is enjoying increasing demand due to growing international connectedness. More recent research suggests that these programs cannot always live up to the high expectations regarding immersion into the target language. In many cases social contact with speakers of the target language are fewer than hoped for and language use more multilingual than anticipated, which can lead to disappointments among the study abroad students. This perspective largely ignores the learning affordances of multilingual language practices or of using the TL as a lingua franca.

Through a mixed methodology of quantitative as well as qualitative approaches we will explore the relationship between students’ language attitudes, their social relations and their linguistic practices abroad with the aim of finding out (a) how effective different patterns of social relations and language use are for linguistic development and (b) what role students’ language attitudes play for the development of their social relations and linguistic skills. The insights from the study will benefit the (further) education of teachers, in particular when it comes to the expectations and assessment of student mobility.