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The Case of the SALA Project: Constructs and Methods Revisited

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Designing Second Language Study Abroad Research

Abstract

The current chapter presents an overview of how the fifteen-year-long Study Abroad and Language Acquisition (SALA) research project was developed, from the onset of study design, to the dissemination of results, and the main dilemmas encountered. The SALA project is well-known as a multi-measure, longitudinal study, dealing with the linguistic and cultural effects of the European Regional Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students (ERASMUS). SALA conducted a cross-sectional analysis of a group of around 200 advanced English as a foreign language degree students who spent three months in an English-speaking country; 100 participated longitudinally. The analysis compared their SA progress with their own progress after a previous period of at home (AH) instruction, both in the short and the long run, in order to understand retention effects a year and a half upon return from abroad. SALA measured effects in listening comprehension and fluency, accuracy and complexity growth, both in speech and writing. It focused on phonology, morphosyntax, vocabulary and discourse, as well as motivation and beliefs, and intercultural awareness. Five practical and methodological dilemmas were encountered in the course of the project: How to find a comparable AH group, how to measure contact time and social interaction while abroad (when contrasting it with the AH instruction), how to keep the same sample population in the study for all three years without losing participants, how to weigh out task effects when the same battery of tests needs to be used for comparability purposes at four data collection times over three years, and finally, how to explain individual variability with the triangulation of the qualitative data with the quantitative data. In discussing these dilemmas, the chapter offers relevant practical steps.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As discussed in European Commission (1995), the multilingual policy was defined as a non-English-only policy, and the 1+2 formula was suggested as a description of the policy goals: all European citizens should be guaranteed access to their first language(s) plus two additional languages, quite probably one of them English, as the international language par excellence.

  2. 2.

    The oral and written data are available to the research community in the OSF databases platform, and the instruments used for data collection are all stored and accessible in the IRIS platform. They have been used in a recent meta-analysis study, counting on the size effects (see Xu, 2019).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

    Carmen Pérez-Vidal

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  1. Carmen Pérez-Vidal
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Correspondence to Carmen Pérez-Vidal .

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  1. Department of German Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Janice McGregor

  2. Department of Languages and Cultures, Saint Mary's University, Halifax, NS, Canada

    John L. Plews

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Pérez-Vidal, C. (2022). The Case of the SALA Project: Constructs and Methods Revisited. In: McGregor, J., Plews, J.L. (eds) Designing Second Language Study Abroad Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05053-4_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05053-4_3

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