Acceso usuarios
Katarzyna Budzińska
International summer schools are a popular way to study a foreign language. Thanks to their multilingual context, learning takes place in the classroom as well as out of class – during social interactions in the target language (TL). It has not been sufficiently explored, however, to what extent study abroad (SA) programmes provide conditions for TL interactions. Additionally, more research is needed in an English as a lingua franca (ELF) context. Furthermore, adolescent summer school students, who are among the most common participants in SA programmes, remain underresearched. This qualitative study fills this gap by interrogating a short SA programme in Malta, where international teenagers come to study English in a lingua franca environment. The data were gathered through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with fifteen learners, eleven instructors, two managers, four activity leaders and two coordinators, as well as a participant observation. ELF interactions were found to stem mostly from the multilingual context, physical structure and shared accommodation. Cliques of compatriots and insufficient integration in the extracurricular aspects of the programme hampered TL interactions. The study results are used to draw practical implications for enhancing interactions in ELF, which could contribute to increasing the effectiveness of SA language education.
