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\n“Immerse yourself in the language,” “impregnate”, “immerse yourself in a language bath”, all expressions that may suggest that a stay abroad is the miracle solution to learn a second language.<\/p>\n
\n“Immerse yourself in the language,” “impregnate”, “immerse yourself in a language bath”, all expressions that may suggest that a stay abroad is the miracle solution to learn a second language.<\/p>\n
Here, we want to quote the author of the blog\u00a0“The world of languages”<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0: “the problem with this myth is that it leads you to believe that once immersed in the country, it will happen something magical that will make you automatically learn the language in a few months without the slightest effort.\u00a0The reality is a little more nuanced.\u00a0And some researchers, including\u00a0Adami and Leclercq<\/a>\u00a0, even spin the immersive metaphor to better show the limits:<\/p>\n “… any individual dipped in this bath logically undergoes the same soaking, but as for the ability to swim is something else.\u00a0But this is precisely where the problem lies: if the host society is a large bath, it is not in any case an Olympic pool, but a cut coastline, with its water holes, its currents and its tides where it is not easy to learn how to swim.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Thus, researchers have largely studied the effect of stay abroad on learning a second language.\u00a0And while they generally agree on the benefit to learners, they recognize interindividual variations that are sometimes quite significant.\u00a0Domain research then focuses on two main aspects:<\/p>\n Before reporting on the work that examines the nature of learners’ linguistic progress and the factors that influence these gains, we briefly wish to shed light on two misunderstandings that seem to blur the representations of linguistic immersion in the collective imagination.<\/p>\n The first concerns the belief, often unacknowledged, that one can learn a second language as one’s mother tongue (L1), in an adaptive way, without conscious effort.\u00a0L1 learned in childhood, however, belongs to a category of knowledge that researchers have called\u00a0“primary”<\/a>\u00a0.<\/p>\n The\u00a0primary knowledge<\/a>\u00a0require to be learned no effort, no conscience, no special motivation.\u00a0It is quite different from so-called “secondary” knowledge (reading, writing, mathematics, etc.), which includes the second language when it is learned in school, in adulthood, or late in life. ‘childhood.<\/p>\n This knowledge requires the individual to be attentive, motivated and consciously control their learning processes.\u00a0We do not dispute the fact that in L2 many acquisitions can be done implicitly and unconsciously.\u00a0But the place of incidental and implicit learning is, in L2, much narrower than the place they occupy for learning the mother tongue.<\/p>\n Exposure to the language and interactions with speakers, native or not, if they are necessary for the acquisition of a second language, can not suffice.<\/p>\n The second misunderstanding that surrounds immersion concerns the unacknowledged but latent goal of achieving a certain level of bilingualism.\u00a0This misunderstanding is due in particular to a very restrictive definition of the concept of bilingualism, which we must seek to get rid of.\u00a0In his latest book,\u00a0Talking Several Languages: The World of Bilinguals<\/em>\u00a0,\u00a0Fran\u00e7ois Grosjean<\/a>\u00a0recalls that, in the 1930s, the idea of \u200b\u200bbilingualism necessarily balanced between two languages \u200b\u200bwas shared by linguists and neurolinguists.<\/p>\n The author shows, however, that this conception has become more relaxed over the years, because it excluded a large number of individuals who could not, however, be “classified” in the “monolingual” category.\u00a0After explaining that bilingualism could also apply to speakers capable of producing significant sentences in two languages \u200b\u200bor mastering at least one language skill (reading, writing, speaking) in two languages, it adopts the following definition:<\/p>\n “Bilingualism is the regular use of two or more languages \u200b\u200bor dialects in everyday life.\u00a0“<\/em><\/p>\n The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages \u200b\u200b(\u00a0CEFR<\/a>) puts greater emphasis on a “plurilingual” communicative competence which is recognized as “leaving the apparently balanced dichotomy of the usual mother tongue \/ second language by insisting on multilingualism, of which bilingualism is only a special case “.<\/p>\n For each of the six levels established by the CEFR (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2), descriptors indicate what must be done in each language competence (reading, writing, speaking orally continuously, taking part of a conversation).\u00a0For example a B2-level user will have to be able to “communicate with a degree of spontaneity and ease” during a conversation with a native speaker.\u00a0This latter definition seems to us to be a much more reasonable objective than balanced bilingualism when it comes to staying abroad.<\/p>\n “The researchers tried to empirically evaluate” the popular myth “, according to which the best way to learn an L2 would be to spend time abroad.\u00a0(Serrano, Lians and Tragant, 2016, our translation) And they have shown that this belief is generally true.<\/p>\n Kinginger<\/a>\u00a0, in the introduction of his book devoted to the acquisition of L2 in a foreign country, notes that this context allows for example the learners to become aware of the registers and styles, to use more idiomatic formulas and acts language (\u00a0speech acts<\/em>\u00a0) during their conversations.<\/p>\n Fluency in oral expression is one of the first aspects that researchers (\u00a0Towell, Hawkins & Bazergui<\/a>\u00a0, 1996;\u00a0Llanes<\/a>\u00a0, 2011;\u00a0DeKeyser<\/a>\u00a0, 2014) have emphasized improvement, with the understanding of the oral.\u00a0In the first study cited, the productions of English-speaking students learning French were examined before and after a six-month stay in France.\u00a0The data show that the stay in France favors the fluidity of production, but does not reach that of a native, and that the improvement observed is due to an increase in the length and complexity of the units produced.<\/p>\n Segalowitz and Freed<\/a>\u00a0also show that after a stay abroad, 22 Anglophones were able to improve the speed of their flow, the number of words per sentence and reduce the number of hesitation marks.\u00a0Other studies<\/a>\u00a0show an increase in the lexical repertoire after a\u00a0stay<\/a>\u00a0abroad.<\/p>\n However, certain aspects of the language do not seem to benefit particularly from the stay abroad.\u00a0Collentine<\/a>\u00a0compared two groups of English-speaking students after a one-semester stay in Spain and Spanish classes in the country respectively.\u00a0The results indicate that language classes taken in the country contribute more to the development of grammatical skills than going abroad, even though the group of students going abroad show greater narrative skills and more semantic richness. dense.<\/p>\n The scientific work has also examined the factors that influence the success of a stay abroad, in an attempt to highlight “predictors” of the linguistic benefit of a stay.\u00a0These factors include: the\u00a0length of stay<\/a>\u00a0, the\u00a0use<\/a>\u00a0, both quantitatively and qualitatively, of the L2 during the stay, the development of socialization networks, also called “communities of practice”, intercultural sensitivity, learner’s personality, age or gender.<\/p>\n Baker-Smemoe, Dewey, Bown and Martinsen\u00a0measured<\/a>\u00a0seven of these variables before, during and after a stay abroad of more than 100 learners.\u00a0To analyze the data, the participants were divided after the stay into two groups called “winners” and “non-winners”.<\/p>\n The researchers were able to examine the differences between these two groups and the different variables that influenced and therefore best predicted the linguistic benefit of an immersive stay.\u00a0The study is very detailed and we summarize the main lines.\u00a0The majority of participants progressed in language proficiency (57 vs. 45).<\/p>\n The three variables that have the most significant effect on language learning are:<\/p>\n Another counterintuitive result seems interesting to us.\u00a0The researchers show the importance of the skills of the friends on the spot in the native language of the learners (here English, which is not the L1 of these friends).\u00a0This leaves a lot of thought, because it is commonly considered that the main issue is the use of the second language and not the mother tongue.\u00a0The authors show here that the use of the learner’s mother tongue is in some cases necessary for it to be introduced by friends in communities of practice, in which he can interact and progress in L2.<\/p>\n In this study, the researchers found no significant effect of age, personality, sex, or, very surprisingly, the use of L2, while other studies had shown influence of these factors.\u00a0Regarding age,\u00a0Llanes and Mu\u00f1oz<\/a>show a benefit of the stay abroad for young learners compared to adults in the same context.<\/p>\n About the personality,\u00a0Zafar and Meenaski<\/a>\u00a0study the relationship between extraversion, risk-taking and level in L2.\u00a0Regarding the sex of the participants, some studies have also shown that it can influence language learning, since women and men can, in some countries, have more or less easy access to communities of practice (\u00a0Brown<\/a>\u00a0, 2013,\u00a0Kinginger<\/a>\u00a0, 2008,\u00a0Trentman<\/a>\u00a0, 2012).<\/p>\n\n
Two misunderstandings<\/strong><\/h4>\n
The linguistic benefits of an immersive stay<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Factors that promote language gains<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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