This presentation will shed light on study abroad students' monolingually or multilingually oriented language attitudes at the outset and the end of their stay abroad. Moreover, it will outline students’ (potentially multilingual) language practices during the stay and explore how these can be related to their aforementioned language attitudes.
This paper presents preliminary results of a longitudinal, mixed-method research project on the development of study abroad (SA) students’ language attitudes and practices. The sample (first cohort of a multi-cohort study) consists of 40 Swiss and German students who spend at least ten weeks in an English-speaking area or an English-medium program elsewhere. We will discuss findings on how their attitudes towards multilingual and non-standard language use are interrelated with how they exploit their language repertoires abroad. This perspective broadens the scope of SA research by challenging its prevailing focus on the target language (TL) as spoken natively, which largely ignores the increasingly multilingual backgrounds of SA students and their host environments. Furthermore, previous findings point to a prevalence of the native speaker ideal among SA students, evidenced in negative attitudes towards English as a Lingua Franca interactions (Dervin 2013) and interactions with non-standard speakers of the TL (Müller & Schmenk 2015). The students’ language attitudes and practices were assessed using online questionnaires. Data analysis involved factor analysis, descriptive statistics of students’ language attitudes and practices, and correlation analyses between the two. We will first illustrate students’ attitudes to provide insights into the degree to which they endorse monolingual norms and language purism. Second, we will discuss students’ language use abroad and position it on a continuum from monolingual to multilingual. Third, we will explore relationships between students’ attitudes and their actual language practices. References: Dervin, F. (2013). Politics of identification in the use of lingua francas in student mobility to Finland and France. In Kinginger, C. (Ed.), Social and Cultural Aspects of Language Learning in Study Abroad. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Müller, M., & Schmenk, B. (2015). Narrating the sound of self: The role of pronunciation in learners’ self-constructions in study-abroad contexts. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 27(1), 132-151.
