Peer Interactions and Second Language Learning

Studying abroad during and before the COVID-19 pandemic

“…This in itself suggests that these students were generally adaptive and resourceful. Scholars studying pre-pandemic SA contexts have put forth that individual factors such as motivation, personality, agency, and foreign language anxiety play a role in creating opportunities for social interaction (e.g., DeKeyser, 2014;Hernández, 2010;Paradowski et al, 2021;Pérez-Vidal, 2014). It is possible that such factors played an even more pronounced role during the pandemic, when societal restrictions reduced contact opportunities.…”

“…Social interaction in the TL may also promote intercultural learning, including an increased understanding for how language is used in social situations (for an overview of the "language and intercultural dimension of education abroad, " see Jackson, 2020). Given that social interaction is important for L2 learning, and that social networks in SA partly determine the language learner's access to interaction in the TL, recent research has investigated international students' social networks (e.g., Dewey et al, 2012Dewey et al, , 2013Isabelli-García, 2006;Mitchell et al, 2017;Paradowski et al, 2021; for a recent overview, see Briggs Baffoe-Djan & Zhou, 2021). Such studies also used questionnaires and interviews to investigate the social networks of SA students, and some studies examined how social networks with TL speakers are formed.…”

“…In fact, interviews revealed that SA students often experience difficulties establishing social relations with TL speakers, a difficulty that they did not necessarily anticipate (e.g., Arvidsson, 2021). Some scholars argue that individual factors such as personality or foreign language anxiety, as well as structural factors, influence the extent that a student seeks opportunities to use the TL outside of class and creates social ties with locals or other TL speakers (e.g., DeKeyser, 2014;Paradowski et al, 2021;Pérez-Vidal, 2014).…”

The relationship between social network typology, L2 proficiency growth, and curriculum design in university study abroad

“…Many studies have elucidated the important role of individual social network indices on sojourners' L2 development in a variety of study abroad contexts (e.g., Baker-Smemoe et al, 2014;Baten, 2020;McManus, 2019), as well as the effect of overall social integration into the host community as measured using social network "strength" scores (e.g., Kennedy Terry, 2017, 2022Mitchell et al, 2017;Pozzi, 2021). Other studies have characterized the social network development of entire groups (Hasegawa, 2019;Paradowski et al, 2021) and subgroups (Gautier, 2019) of learners. However, previous research has not yet made a connection, through quantitative analysis, between L2 development and a typology (i.e., a classification system) of social network patterns.…”

How Output Outweighs Input and Interlocutors Matter for Study‐Abroad SLA: Computational Social Network Analysis of Learner Interactions

“…To comprehensively characterize the latter (and subsequently the structure of the entire network), established metrics were used such as node degree, closeness, betweenness, and other centrality measures (Ochab, 2012; Paradowski, Jarynowski, Czopek, & Jelińska, 2021; Paradowski, Jarynowski, Jelińska, & Czopek, 2021), as well as local clustering coefficients (Saramäki et al., 2007), using generalizations of these metrics to weighted graphs (Opsahl et al., 2010), which allows for both the number and strength of interactions to contribute to the metrics. Additionally, we tested three community detection algorithms: Infomap (Rosvall & Bergstrom, 2008), Louvain method of modularity maximization (Blondel et al., 2008), and order statistics local optimization method (OSLOM; Lancichinetti et al., 2011) enhanced with the consensus algorithm by Lancichinetti & Fortunato (2012).…”