The Language Environments of Exchange Students at Scandinavian Universities

Tim Caudery, University of Århus

Margrethe Petersen, Århus School of Business

Philip Shaw, Stockholm University & KTH Stockholm

Abstract and Keywords

Exchange students who come to Scandinavia are often motivated by an intention to improve their proficiency in English rather than the local language. They take academic classes conducted in English and may find themselves living in a lingua-franca English bubble, acculturated to an international-student subculture. A few do break out of the bubble, learn the local language, and experience the local culture. Here we report on a project intended identify the factors leading to successful learning of both English and the local languages. 70 students at each of four institutions, two in Sweden, two in Denmark, were interviewed three times over a semester and asked to complete simple language tests. English proficiency improved in most cases, Swedish/Danish was only learnt by those with good initial English and appropriate motivation. As expected, contact with local students was limited. Institutional policies can probably influence these outcomes.

Exchange students, language, Scandinavia, lingua-franca English.

Introduction

The Council of Europe has set a goal for plurilingualism that encourages all Europeans to know two languages other than their own (Breidbach 2003). If CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) programmes at European universities truly aimed to achieve this goal we would see British students doing some of their study of, say, economics or engineering through the medium of French and some through German. CLIL that used French or German as the medium would be common alongside English medium classes in Spanish universities, and so forth. In fact, however, CLIL most often involves English-medium classes, and these most often seem only incidentally intended for local students but actually put on to attract foreign students. In many programmes in Germany the idea is that international students will eventually have good enough German to study through that medium, and in this the Council of Europe’s goal is achieved. But in a number of other situations all academic study is in English. A Spanish-speaking student coming on exchange to Scandinavia can reasonably expect all classes to be in English (background in Airey and Linder 2006, Berg et al 2001, Gunnarsson 2001, Josephson 2004, Söderlundh 2004), so that the second possible language-learning experience – learning the local language – becomes completely voluntary and in fact, as we shall show, quite difficult. If all instruction is in English, there is a risk that the local language is not learnt, and the exchange and CLIL experience becomes one which supports English as the general lingua franca and what Phillipson (2003) calls “English-only Europe” rather than plurilingualism. In fact one could say that by making English essential for academic success and the local language merely recreational for exchange students CLIL sends a very powerful message about the language hierarchy.

In general, the four main objectives of students studying abroad under the Erasmus scheme have been found to be: learning a culture or personal development by means of such learning, improved knowledge of a foreign language, academic learning, and professional enhancement (Maiwurm 2001, see also Figel 2006a and b), often in that order of priority. Neither content nor language learning is the highest priority.

Furthermore, Maiworm says, 90% of the exchange students studied by means of postal questionnaire in the extensive Socrates 2000 project believed that they had reached an adequate level of language proficiency at the end of the visit. There is evidence that many exchange students do indeed become more fluent, if not more accurate, in the language of the host community (Wilkinson 1998, Engle and Engle 2004, Freed 1995). Specifically, most “make extensive, rapid progress in the basic vocabulary to which they are most intensely exposed: [....] home, meals, classroom, public transportation, and various social settings” (Engle and Engle 2004 : 65).

However, the culture to which exchange students are exposed may not be exactly what is expected. Engle and Engle point out that for US students abroad “the prospect of a genuinely challenging, creatively unsettling cultural and linguistic experience abroad has receded yearly” because of “the increasing prevalence of English as a nearly universal lingua franca, the daily reality of instant electronic communication, and the near omnipresence of certain realities and symbols of American pop culture” (2004: 221). Correspondingly, for European students the cultural and linguistic experience may not be so much of the local culture and language but of the globalised community of international students, based in globalised (American) popular culture, and using lingua franca English.

In Scandinavia today, for example, many exchange students live and eat with other exchange students, or at best (and rarely) with Scandinavian peers who speak English to them. They take courses taught in English, and, like many others in Europe described in this volume, universities in Scandinavia are offering an increasing number of such English-medium courses largely in order to facilitate visits by exchange students with little or no knowledge of the local language. According to Coleman (1998), only 19% of the courses taken by exchange students in Denmark were in Danish ten years ago, and the proportion is likely to have fallen further since then (as our own survey suggests). Most of the social settings that students encounter can be handled in English, and most people whom they interact with automatically switch to English. Consequently any “extensive, rapid progress” exchange students make in language skills is likely to be in lingua franca English (Seidlhofer 2001) and the culture to which they become assimilated is at least partly the culture or interculture of internationalised youth. They do indeed learn intercultural competence (Byram 1997), but do so by participating in this interculture rather than by directly confronting the local one.

In fact, Huebner’s generalisation (1998) that all study abroad in a different language community offers opportunities for informal language learning may not actually be true. Where both natives and visitors share the view that foreigners cannot be expected to learn the local language, a faltering attempt to use it can evoke a response in convincing English, and opportunities for language learning may be few and far between. On the other hand, of course, we do know that some exchange students make contacts with Scandinavian society, learn the language, start to take classes in the local language, and have something more like the traditional study-abroad experience.

One could hypothesise that these different responses to the CLIL situation result from differences in motivation. Only relatively few exchange students come with the primary objective of improving their skills in the language of the country concerned, and even fewer are actually taking degrees in a Scandinavian language. Many may regard improving their English language skills as one objective of their visit, while others may have no particular interest in language improvement at all, but be more interested in the general experience of an exchange from an academic or cultural viewpoint (the other three of the aims defined in Maiworm 2001). English skills may thus be seen by many students simply as a tool to facilitate the exchange, and countries and educational institutions may be selected as hosts mainly or entirely because they offer relevant courses taught through the medium of English.

While this situation is likely to be particularly true in Scandinavian countries or other countries where the local language is not widely studied, it is probably also of growing importance in other areas of Europe and the world (Coleman 2006), and certainly favoured by the spread of English-medium CLIL. Exchange students whose specialist subject is not languages, and who are offered classes in English, may well find themselves in a community whose natural lingua franca is not the local language, but English. In fact it may be becoming increasingly difficult for exchange students to enter the local-language community in many European countries.

But this is quite a vital issue. While one aim of government and EU support for exchange students is to “internationalise at home” (Nilsson 2001) and create an open environment for cultural and intellectual exchange in the university, another is to encourage and strengthen the learning of the country’s own language. For host countries, imparting or improving a knowledge of the local language may be seen as advantageous in winning friends among the educated population of the world, either because it facilitates exchange students’ contacts with the local population or because it increases the number of people outside the country who have an interest in and connection with their language. Organisations promoting exchange in order to promote intercultural communication and understanding in Europe or the world may see language improvement as useful to their objectives, and may, like the Council of Europe, aim at plurilingualism rather thanlingua franca English (Breidbach 2003, Coleman 2006). Educational institutions, on the other hand, are likely to be concerned that exchange students are sufficiently proficient in the language of instruction for them to benefit from their courses and pass their examinations, and also that they have adequate control of a language for survival outside the classroom.

In the light of these tensions, it seems important to know more about the relatively unfamiliar situation of international student exchanges where only a minority of incomers learn the local language. Our research project sets out to investigate the language experiences of students while on exchange in two Scandinavian countries, Sweden and Denmark. Like Wilkinson (1998: 121) we want to know “What happens during a sojourn in a different cultural and linguistic environment? What kinds of contacts do students have within such a context?” The project, which is partly financed by the Nordic Council of Ministers, seeks answers to the following questions, among others:

  • What is exchange students’ experience of the bi/tri-lingual environments (Swedish or Danish, English and the students’ L1) in which they are moving? Which languages are associated with which domains? Who do the students speak to? In which language(s)?
  • Which language(s), if any, do they want to learn or improve?
  • How successful are students in improving their second language skills? In what particular skills are improvements likely to be most evident?
  • What factors are associated with success in improving skills in either local languages or lingua franca English?
  • Are there institutional measures that could be taken to influence the process of language improvement? How useful are pre-sessional courses, for example?

This paper reports on some of the preliminary findings from the academic year 2005-2006 concerning student motivation for going on exchange as well as interaction and language improvement while on exchange.

Method

Data collection was based on semi-structured interviews with volunteer exchange students at two Swedish university institutions and two Danish ones: Stockholm University (SU), the Royal Technical Institute (Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan – KTH), Stockholm, the Aarhus School of Business (ASB), and the University of Aarhus (AU). The findings discussed here are based on interviews with around 30-40 students at each institution (the final number is expected to be 70 at each of the institutions involved in the project). Subjects were drawn from volunteers who were all:

  • first-language speakers of French, German or Spanish (and languages spoken in Spain) as the main language groups, supplemented by first-language speakers of Italian, Dutch, Polish and Czech[1]
  • students who had not studied the language of the host country before
  • students who were not studying language subjects.

Wherever relevant, the selection of subjects from the lists of volunteers aimed at obtaining a balance with respect to gender, countries of origin, and subjects of study. However, the sample of exchange students was clearly not representative, and results have to be regarded as essentially a series of case studies. Further complications follow from the differences in students’ situations: Sweden and Denmark are not the same, Stockholm and Aarhus are not the same, and the various participating institutions differ both in their academic cultures and in the ways in which they treat exchange students. Some students have the opportunity to take language courses in Danish/Swedish, either as presessional courses or as courses during the academic semester, or both. Some students attend academic courses taught through the medium of Danish/Swedish, while others only attend courses taught in English. Some students are housed with other exchange students, while others live in situations surrounded by native speakers of the host country’s language. Nevertheless, the results were subjected to statistical analysis where relevant, and conclusions drawn with suitable caution and provisos.

Each student was interviewed three times: shortly after the start of the teaching semester, mid-way through, and around the time that teaching finished. Students who stayed for two semesters were interviewed once more at the end of their stay. Interviewees were rewarded for their participation in the project with a cinema voucher for each interview. Interviewers were either the researchers or paid student assistants. The interviews were recorded so that the discourse as well as the content could be analysed at some stage.

Interviews followed a questionnaire enquiring about students’ expectations or experiences with regard to language use, their motivations for learning languages, their reasons for selecting the host country and institution for their exchange, their perceived progress with the local language and English, etc. As part of each interview, they completed forms detailing how much of their total interaction with other people was spent in interacting with particular types of people, and what languages were used. As the semester progressed, the study kept track of how perceived patterns of interaction changed.

In addition to the questionnaires concerning their experiences of language use, students were given tests in their language proficiency. These tests were designed to be quick and easy to administer, and to give an overall impression of whether there was clear progress with language proficiency; they were not intended to be thorough tests of language skill or pragmatic/sociolinguistic competence.

The main test required students to describe a picture, talking if possible for around two minutes. They did this first in English, and then in Swedish/Danish if possible. These descriptions were recorded. Three pictures were used; the students were presented with a different picture at each interview, but the sequences in which students saw the pictures were varied from student to student. At present, these recordings are being processed; raters are attempting to state the sequence in which they think the recordings were made for each student, working on the assumption that students’ performance will improve over time. Each set of recordings will be sequenced by at least two raters, who will also indicate the features of the language that appeared to improve. Where raters are in agreement as to the sequence of the descriptions, and where the sequence they believe took place tallies with the actual sequence, this will be taken as evidence of language improvement. Where there is disagreement between the raters or where the sequence they believe took place does not tally with the actual sequence, this will be taken as evidence that no real improvement has taken place, or even that there has been degeneration.

Since many of the students were never able to make even a rudimentary description of a picture in Danish/Swedish, students were also given simple vocabulary tests in the language of the host country, the expectation being that these would give an indication of any progress even if students never reached a level at which they could really communicate in the language. Items tested were all frequently-occurring nouns drawn from domains such as transport, people, buildings, food and study, and attempts were made to ensure that they did not have obvious cognates in German,[2] Spanish or French. Students were given a list of eight words in Danish/Swedish and asked to match them with words from a list of twelve in their first language. Once again, there were three different tests, and students were given the tests in different sequences, one at each interview.

In the case of students staying for two semesters, the tests at their final, second-semester interview required them to complete all three vocabulary tests once again.

Results

As the findings reported below regarding motivations, interaction and language learning are based on preliminary analyses of the data collected so far, the results should be treated with great caution at this stage. There is much more to be learned from the interview forms and recordings, and although we have noted some trends, our early impressions may have to be revised as we study the data more closely.

Motivations

On the basis of the first interviews with 45 exchange students at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, 24 at the University of Stockholm, Sweden and 26 at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, an analysis was made of the reasons given for going on exchange at all and for choosing a particular country, city or institution. Subjects could mention as many reasons as they wished,and the questions were posed in an open-ended way (no choices were offered). The categories in the tables and figures thus represent consolidations of the reasons given. These of course reflect the discourses available to the subject for describing motivation as much as any objective motives, but these discourses are of considerable interest in any case.