Language and culture learning abroad: Mediating pre-service World Languages teachers' development of interculturality
Open Access
- Author:
- Pasterick, Michelle Le
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- January 28, 2015
- Committee Members:
- Matthew Edward Poehner, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Patrick Willard Shannon, Committee Member
Elizabeth A Smolcic, Committee Member
Celeste S Kinginger, Committee Member - Keywords:
- world languages
interculturality
study abroad
foreign language
intercultural competence - Abstract:
- The development of intercultural understanding and the ability to interact appropriately and effectively with people from other cultures has become extremely important in today’s globalized, multilingual world. Given the inextricable link between language and culture, one place where this intercultural learning and development might take place is in the world languages classroom. If this is to be the case, then language teachers must first experience their own learning and development in this area so that they can provide necessary expertise and support to their students. One natural site in which teachers can learn and develop interculturally is during a study abroad experience. During this time abroad, however, participants cannot be left to their own devices with the assumption that they will learn just by virtue of being in another culture. Rather they must be supported in ways that allow them to develop skills, such as those of reflection and analysis, which will help them better understand themselves and their target language and culture so that they can interact successfully in various intercultural contexts. Employing Vygotskian sociocultural theory, where development is understood not as a natural process internal to learners and driven by internal individual factors but rather as a result of dialogic social interactions with others, as well as the constructs of intercultural competence and symbolic competence (brought together in the notion of interculturality) for the design of the course and analysis of the data, this study attempts to learn more about the impact of specific kinds of mediation on students’ intercultural development while abroad. Specifically, it looks at the forms and functions of mediation provided in an online course that was designed to facilitate students’ engagement with their host cultures and dialogic interactions between students and a facilitator around a variety of intercultural topics. The study also attempts to fill a gap in the existing research by looking specifically at learners’ processes of development during study abroad, as opposed to the results, and how mediation that is focused and systematic mediation might impact that development. Using qualitative data from students’ written responses to blog prompts and classmate and facilitator feedback as well as other assignments and activities, this study looks at the different types and foci of the mediation provided by the course structure and how those worked together to help students in the process of developing interculturality. The study also looks at two case studies to examine how different students experience their time aboard, how they engage with particular mediational foci and how that engagement with the mediation might impact their development. The study illustrates how both the structural and dialogic elements of the course work together to mediate students’ experiences and their intercultural learning and development. It also illustrates the importance, for their processes of development, of the ways in which students engage with mediation offered toward their understanding of language use, communication, and culture and toward their abilities to move beyond emotional responses to analytical ones and to make connections between and across the variety of experiences that they have while abroad.