Studying or residing abroad is many times seen as the most favourable option when it comes to learning or developing a second language (L2). Given the social and cultural variables involved in the study abroad (SA) realm, additional aspects such as intercultural competence (IC) and communicative skills also seem to take advantage of such stays (Heinzmann et al., 2015). Nonetheless, when reviewing the SA literature it is easy to notice that research on aspects other than linguistic development have only received little attention. Furthermore, the traditional SA context (i.e. going abroad to a country where the L2 is the official language) has been the focus of most SA research, whereas other contexts such as the English as a Lingua Franca one (i.e. going abroad to a country where the L2 is not the official language but used for means of communication) have only been overlooked (Köylü, 2021).
The present study qualitatively explores IC development, and how this construct evolves after a semester-long ELFSA experience in light of using English as a lingua franca. The participants of the study (n = 7) are tertiary level credit and degree seeking students from two different national and native tongue (L1) backgrounds, a group of Catalan/Spanish bilinguals (n= 3) and a group of Turkish L1s peakers (n = 4) ERASMUS exchange students and English was their L2. Following a stimulated-recall protocol, semi-structured interviews were performed to elicit information from the participants. All the participants were reminded of their previous performances and/or interview data, elicited years ago by the same researchers for different projects. Apart from individual interviews conducted in the participants' L1, two focus group interviews were administered to collect data: an L1 focus group interview conducted with the speakers of the same L1s and another focus group interview where English was used as a lingua franca among the participants, who are from different L1 backgrounds. The data from these interviews were first transcribed verbatim and later coded and analysed for emergent themes in light of conceptualizations of IC (Byram, 1997). Results suggest that participating in an ELFSA experience within the ERASMUS framework contributes to IC development in terms of cultural empathy and flexibility, among others. The social and pedagogical aspects of ELF, on the other hand, were highly valued among the participants who considered ELF to be a major reason to end up with raised IC awareness and communicative skills, along with gains in English.
References:
Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence. Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters.
Heinzmann, S., Künzle, R., Schallhart, N., & Müller, M. (2015). The effect of study abroad on intercultural competence: Results from a longitudinal quasi-experimental study. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, 26(1), 187-208
Köylü, Z. (2021). The ERASMUS sojourn: does the destination country or pre-departure proficiency impact oral proficiency gains? The Language Learning Journal.
