No abstract

Over the past three decades, a considerable number of studies have investigated the connection between study abroad and second language acquisition to the exclusion of another emerging language profile, that of heritage language learners who study abroad to enhance their home language skills. The few studies on heritage language learners’ development of local features abroad have focused on phonological ones, concluding that more in-depth exposure to the varieties abroad was related to increased production of the local features (Escalante, 2018; George & Hoffman-González, in press). Research on the effects of international service learning have also been limited to second language learners, demonstrating increased second language use and proficiency (Martinsen, Baker, Dewey, Bown, & Johnson, 2010) along with the development of geographically-variable patterns of use (Salgado-Robles, 2018). The current study combines these two fields and investigates the development of a variable local feature (vosotros versus ustedes) by 20 U.S. Spanish-speaking heritage language learners of Mexican descent studying abroad for four months in Spain. The experimental group (N = 10) participated in a service learning course in addition to traditional coursework, while the control group (N = 10) completed traditional coursework and no service learning course. The results of the Oral Discourse Completion Task demonstrated that all participants significantly increased their use of vosotros from the beginning to the end of the semester; however, the change by the experimental group was two times higher than the control group. This could be explained by the results of the Language Contact Profile, which revealed more use of Spanish and less use of English by participants in the experimental group. This study offers implications for future study abroad programs, the linguistic impacts of service-learning, and the development of sociolinguistic competence.

In the last 25 years, the topic of learning strategies has attracted a great deal of interest, quite often to analyse the use first (L1) and second language (L2) learners make of these strategies and how they can be helped to improve strategy knowledge. Although it is true that there has been considerable research on strategies, a smaller number of studies have attempted to explore the strategies that learners use in content and language integrated learning (CLIL) contexts, and even fewer when learning a third language (L3). This article seeks to fill that gap by reporting the findings of an intervention study into reading comprehension among young learners of English as an L3 in a multilingual (Spanish-Basque-English) context in the Basque Country.