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What is Study Abroad?

What kind of language usage do we find when students are abroad?

Well, when students go abroad to send a year or six months abroad, they are mainly faced with two situations: on the one hand, they are faced with the informal use of language, the language that they use in the street, in their social encounters. And of course they are also faced with the use of the language that they need in the academic situation that they are travelling to, the universities they go to. So, this academic language they are faced with: in terms of the type of situation or events, for example lectures, or the types of genres, the type of products they have to write, for example essays they have to produce. They are also faced with the situation where they have to interact with other people, and this is the case of ‘office hours’. So, as we can see, there is a great variety of situations in which students can be talking to other people in these study abroad situations.

Can you tell us about ‘Office Hours’?

Yes, there is a specific type of academic encounter that students are faced with, that apparently doesn’t pose any particular problem to them, and this is the encounter that they have with their instructors. This is what we call office hours. The problem is that the terminology is not well understood by the student because, for example in Spanish we use tutorial as an equivalent. But it is a different thing. It is face to face interaction with their instructors where they oppose different problems they have about the content, the exams, the essays they have to submit. This is a very important academic encounter, and this is what we call office hours.

What happens linguistically in those office hours?

In terms of content in these academic encounters that we call office hours, we can see that students are more worried about the content of the lectures and they ask a lot about the content that the lecturer has been explaining to them in previous lectures, and they are also very interested in the assessment criteria that the lecturer is going to use in the exams. They also ask about the projects and the essays they have to submit. This is in terms of content. In terms of language, we have found in an analysis that we have carried out at the University of Extremadura that there is a lot of use of metaphors in the speech of the lecturers, and the density of the language they use and the density of metaphors is very high, it’s about 13%. And of course, the use of metaphors by lecturers is much higher than the use of metaphors by students. We have to take into account that these students are non-native speakers of the language. This means that, of course, the students have problems sometimes in understanding their lecturers when they talk to them, in interpreting. For example, one very useful example the metaphor ‘Understanding is seeing’, because sometimes students interpret these types of metaphors literally and as looking at things literally and not metaphorically. And this is very important form the point of view of the lecturer. And of course it is also very important that the interaction is richer in terms of the contact that the lecturer and the student have when the student reuses the metaphorical framework that the lecturer provides to him or to her. So, in this sense, there is more interaction when the student reuses and what we call uses a burst of metaphors that is related to the framework provided by the lecturer.

What advice would you give to students and teachers?

I think the lessons that we have learned from the studies that we have been carrying out is mostly that we need to prepare students and lecturers for the experience they are going to be experiencing. And of course the main advice would be to pay attention to cultural differences. Cultural differences which are normally understood in terms of folklore, but in this case they should be understood in terms of academic cultural difference, because there are different ways of going about the same problems in different universities in Europe. The Erasmus experience has obviously put forward these differences. Of course, we should prepare lecturers to pay attention to language problems, to be more linguistically aware especially about the metaphors they are using. They should be conscious of the metaphors their language uses, in this case we began by analyzing English which is the language used in most EMI situations. Of course, in these situations the metaphors that are typically used should be clearly something that is brought to the front for the teachers. What are the metaphors they use in their classes? Well, the metaphors that they use in their office hours. This will allow them to reach students much better, to make students understand what they want them to understand. This is very important. And, of course, here we talk about metaphor in terms of how we understand one thing in terms of another. To give you an example, in English, which is the language we typically analyze, we understand topics in terms of places, and we talk about an area where something is done, an area of research, an area of investigation. This is a typical metaphor, and sometimes our students don’t understand that we are talking this way. This is something that we need to prepare our lecturers to talk about, to understand and to be able to make their students understand as well.