Chris Medina
Pronouns: He/Him/His
UROP Fellowship: Community College Summer Fellowship Program
Grand Rapids Community College
Research Mentor(s): Lorenzo Garcia-Amaya, PhD
Department of Romance Languages & Literatures
Presentation Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 | Session 3 | Presenter: 9
Authors: Chris Medina, Jessica Schrader & Lorenzo García-Amaya
Abstract
Previous research has shown that not all second language (L2) learners benefit equally from a Study Abroad (SA) experience. Often, prior to participating in Study Abroad programs, L2 learners have very high expectations about the progress that they will be experiencing abroad (Fraser 2002; Freed, 1990; 2000; Hernández, 2010; Martinsen, 2011; Mendelson 2004; Vande Berg et al., 2009, Whitworth, 2006), particularly regarding their L2 fluency. However, these expectations are frequently not met (DeKeyser, 1986; Dewey et al., 2014; Rivers, 1998; Wilkinson, 1998a, 1998b; García-Amaya, 2017). One of the factors that have been recently identified is that in programs that lack an institutional language pledge, learners tend to use their L2 less throughout the progress of the program, while the opposite is true for the language they share as a group (García-Amaya, 2017).
L2 fluency, which pertains to smoothness and ease of oral speech (Lennon, 1990), is one of the aspects of interlanguage development that seem to benefit the most through the increased opportunities of L2 interaction that may take place in Study Abroad contexts. The current study explores the development of L2 fluency in the interlanguage development of a group of L2 learners participating in a 7-week intensive overseas immersion program with an established language pledge. Three times throughout the duration of their Study Abroad experience, participants completed a Spanish monologic task. The task consisted of 20 open-ended questions, that developed from 10 frequent topics (e.g., 2 questions per topic). While the topics were kept the same throughout the study, the questions were slightly different at each data collection time to avoid repeating answers. These responses were digitally recorded, transcribed, and later analyzed with Praat.
The latter analysis consisted of separating speech from hesitation phenomena, including filled and silent pauses. Particular attention was also paid to the lengthening of word endings. The results indicate that while some fluency metrics showed clear increases such as speech rate (syllables per second), other metrics portray a more complex reality. For example, although it seems counterintuitive that the learners produced more filled pauses and silent pauses over time, both hesitation phenomena were much shorter than before and appeared between longer stretches of speech. Interestingly, although these results were averaged across topics, a topic effect on fluency metrics was also uncovered by this task design. Finally, all such findings will be discussed in light of the specifics of the institutional language pledge that defined the current program.
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Research Disciplines
Arts and Humanities
