Language contact during transnational student mobility: spaces and affordances during Covid-19

Until very recently International Student Mobility was a highly desirable element of the student experience. Short-term credit-bearing programmes such as Erasmus + and whole degree experiences abroad have garnered prestige over the past number of years. These often result in long-term benefits for participants in terms of expanding linguistic repertoires, increasing awareness of interculturality, forging international networks and acquiring transferable skills valued by the workplace. However, international student mobility has been disrupted by the Covid 19 pandemic with many programmes including those for Study Abroad / International students, pivoting to online. While the impact of this on the number of international / Study Abroad students travelling has been mostly disruptive, the effect of the pandemic and related social distancing measures on the experience of those who decided to partake in international mobility during the current academic year has been enormous and has undoubtedly negatively affected students' interaction with the target language, exposure to cultural experiences and the creation of social bonds during the sojourn. In light of this, the current study seeks to explore, from a qualitative and longitudinal perspective, the experiences of eight Study Abroad / International students for whom language development was a major catalyst for embarking on such a programme in the host country. Previous research has highlighted that linguistic gains are often predicated on exposure to intense and diverse social interactions through the establishment of social networks and incidental encounters with the language while abroad (Dewey, Belnap & Hillstrom 2013; Gautier & Chevrot 2015; Baten 2020; Tang, Taguchi & Li 2021). Given the unique nature of the pandemic, the current study, using semi-structured interviews aims to shed light on how the differential interaction with physical and socially constructed spaces (Benson 2021) impacted on the opportunities for language contact.