Pixel International Conferences

Study Abroad (SA) has been claimed as an effective and efficient way of L2 learning (Kinginger 2013). However, previous SA investigations generally focused on SA experience in a short duration of one year, which might not be able to explore the impact of SA on L2 development fully. Therefore, this study seeks to examine how L2 develops in a long-term SA. Specifically, it aims to determine how oral fluency develops in a long-term four-years study abroad in China with an Italian L2 Chinese learner. It should be worth noting that, while there are diverse interpretations of SA, the learner in our study is a SA case in that the learner comes to China to learn Chinese, and he has been in the state of study as a student. The data of an Italian L2 Chinese learner was collected from 2019 to 2022, four times for the first semester, four times for the second semester, one for the second year, and one for the fourth year. The data were transcribed and coded to explore the long-term oral Chinese fluency development. The measure of speech rate was adopted with its popularity in Chinese-as-a-second-language (CSL) research (cf. Du 2013; Wright & Zhang 2014). Findings showed that SA generally had beneficial effects on Chinese oral development in terms of fluency, confirming previous SA research and CSL research on the effect of SA on oral development (Du 2013). The findings also showed that the development of oral Chinese fluency development was in a progressing pattern but not linear across time, suggesting that L2 linguistic development might be non-linear over time, which asks for more studies on post-SA continuation impact. In addition, findings proposed the potential influence of the Covid-19 pandemic on L2 learning. Such results give us a chance to have a better understanding of L2 fluency development in SA and an opportunity to examine the factors that characterize the effects of SA while presenting a full picture of fluency development in a long-term SA.

Keywords：Study Abroad, CSL, oral fluency development, long term

Seleced References

[1] Du, Hang. (2013). The development of Chinese fluency during study abroad in China. The Modern Language Journal, 97 (1), 131-143.

[2] Kinginger, C. (2013). Identity and language learning in study abroad. Foreign Language Annals, 46 (3), 339-358

[3] Wright, C., & Zhang C. (2014). Examining the effects of study abroad on L2 Chinese development