My dissertation explores how language-immersive study abroad can support the development of plurilingual-pluricultural competence (PPC), which is “the ability to use languages for the purposes of communication and to take part in intercultural interaction, where a person, viewed as a social actor has proficiency, of varying degrees, in several languages and experience of several cultures” (Coste et al., 2009, p. 11). The concept of PPC informs the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) language proficiency scale and can help us understand what students may learn through study abroad.

Here's a summary of which program features best supported PPC growth in my study:

1. Housing: Students’ PPC benefited from homestays with hosts who engaged with them (i.e., in conversation and activities). If a beginner student is paired with a more advanced student, having 2 students per homestay can function well to give the beginner student more scaffolding for negotiating meaning with their hosts. Living in dorms with students from the program can perpetuate the program bubble.

2. Site & Logistics: Studying at a local university can help students interact with local peers and access courses that suit their needs. Sheltered programs may work best for beginner language learners & students who value more support (program staff help provide this support).

3. Language exchanges: Language exchanges can greatly foster PPC when systematically organized (i.e., they occur on a regular basis and students are linked with partners whose goals for the program correspond with their own).

4. Coursework: Language & intercultural coursework is useful for students to be able to interact successfully with the local community. Students appreciate experiential learning. Local instructors may need training on how to support diverse students.

For more information about these findings, please consult my slides from the 2024 UC Davis Symposium on Language Research.

• Peer and AI Review and Reflection Packet: In this document, you can find the curricular materials for the PAIRR project, including readings to build critical AI literacy, AI feedback prompts, and examples of AI feedback.

• AI & Student Writing Teaching Guide: This handout provides ideas for how instructors might support student learning by teaching students how to use AI critically. Multilingual students might benefit from receiving and reflecting on language-level feedback that they can elicit from systems like ChatGPT through prompts such as, "Copy edit this text. Then, tell me what you changed and why."

• Writing & AI: Resources for Instructors: A selection of readings for instructors who would like to learn more about how AI works and how they might use AI in their classes. 

• Resources for Students to Develop Critical AI Literacy: A reading list of articles that can inform students about potential affordances and issues with AI use in their writing.

The Corpus of Written Spanish- L2 and Heritage is a completely open-access collection of essays written by learners of Spanish as a second or heritage language at University of California, Davis. There are currently over 4,000 essays from more than 2,500 students, offering both longitudinal and cross-sectional data. Students have responded to 8 different prompts, and we are continuing to add more. Many of the essays have been manually annotated for certain patterns of learner language use (e.g., grammatical gender agreement). The data is available in text file and csv format. We have also part-of-speech tagged the corpus using the Freeling tagger. 

Website

Steps for using the corpus

I have several scripts in R and Python on Github that can serve as a resource for other researchers.

R for Data Science (Wickham & Grolemund, 2017): an incredible reference for working with data in R

Statistics for Linguists: An Introduction Using R (Winter, 2020): a great handbook for statistical analysis in R

NLTK book (Bird, Klein, & Loper, 2009): a basis for corpus linguistics in python

On this webpage, you can find slides and a handout for a workshop on using corpora to teach Spanish as a second language (ELE). The following are some of the corpora referenced:

• Reference corpora: CORPES, Corpus del español, CORDIAM

• Learner corpora: CEDEL2, CAES

As a co-chair of the CLR in 2021-22, I am very excited to share our events with you. We host a bi-weekly talk series and an annual symposium in May. The talk series is streamed on Zoom for anyone who would like to attend virtually. Don't forget to submit an abstract to the symposium!

CLR Website | CLR Twitter