LARA

Learning and Residence Abroad in Practice

3. Where should the period(s) abroad come in the course?

Residence abroad for the students should obviously take place at the point(s) at which it most positively helps them towards the objectives of the course. If its purpose is primarily to improve the students' competence in the language in order to enable them to deal better with the academic aspects of the course, a case could be made for requiring them to go abroad before they start at the home institution. After all, applicants for places who have already spent a lengthy period in the relevant country are looked on more favourably than those who have not, other things being equal. There are no doubt valid reasons for rejecting such a proposal but the possible alternatives need to be considered carefully and the logical place for the period abroad in relation to the continuum of the students' experience selected.

The period abroad does not, for instance, necessarily have to be the third year of a four-year course. Most degree-courses make a distinction between the first year and the rest, the first year being concerned with the principles and study methods of the discipline, the other years with applying those principles and methods to a range of specialised areas and aspects of the discipline. If the primary aims of the period abroad are to improve the students' linguistic competence and intercultural awareness, there is a good case for choosing the second year so that the advantage of those improvements can be brought to bear on the advanced stages of the curriculum.

Those courses that have adopted an alternative to the third-year-out structure have done so because the purpose of the residence abroad is clear and it will best fulfil its function at another point in the course. Many of the examples of a second-year-out structure, for instance, are to be found in courses that recruit to an ab initio language stream. The need to enable students to make rapid linguistic progress early in the course so that they can catch up with the post-A-level entry as soon as possible overrides other considerations and dictates the position of the residence abroad.

Students of Italian at the University of Exeter follow different paths according to whether they are beginners or not. The ab initio students spend their second year in Italy and those who enter the course with GCSE, A-Level or an equivalent knowledge of Italian usually spend their third year abroad. However, the arrangements are flexible and, if a GCSE (or even A-Level) student is linguistically weak, s/he is advised to go abroad in the second year rather than the third.

As a general principle, staff at Exeter have noted that the earlier the students go abroad, the better they progress with their studies on return to Exeter. This seems to be for a number of reasons:

  1. direct familiarity with Italy makes it easier to understand what they study later;
  2. they have had the chance to establish good contacts which provide the opportunity of e-mail links and further exchange visits;
  3. an early experience in Italy often works as a stimulus for pursuing individual research for their dissertation on topics students have become interested in while abroad;
  4. having the third and fourth year in Exeter gives them time to settle back into the UK system without having to worry immediately about finals or job interviews.

The second-year-out structure may also be appropriate for post-A-level-entry students, however, where the teaching, writing of assignments and examining are consistently carried out in the foreign language, since the students need not only to be linguistically proficient but also to have a lengthy experience of life in the foreign country, if not before they start the course then at least before they embark on the advanced stages of it.

At the University of Warwick, students of Italian (beginners and post-GCSE / A-Level) spend their second year at an Italian university as an integral part of their degree. They are guaranteed a SOCRATES placement for the duration of their stay. They also have an additional 4 weeks residence in Italy in the summer vacation before their final year. There is an exception for students who are studying Italian as part of a joint degree with either French or German and have an A-Level (or equivalent) in Italian. Those students go abroad in their third year and can opt to spend the year in either of the relevant countries. They too have an extra 4 weeks residence in Italy; for them it comes in the summer between Years 1 and 2.

Students of French Studies or German Studies at Oxford Brookes University spend the second year abroad in order to bring their linguistic competence and their intercultural insight to a level at which they can derive maximum benefit from the advanced modules, taught in the foreign language.

Nor does the period abroad necessarily have to correspond to a complete academic year. A semester-based system would allow two separate periods abroad with different objectives, one in the earlier part of the course to give a rapid boost to the students' competence in the language and one in the later part, perhaps to enable them to undertake some specified academic exercise. A work-placement could be structured to cover one semester plus the attached long vacation, producing a period abroad of perhaps seven months, equal to the period actually spent following courses at many continental universities.

Only 7% of the courses in the NRAD survey were not constructed on a third-year-out pattern and it is difficult to avoid concluding that, in many cases, that is the norm because it is the structure hallowed by time and represents the path of least resistance. It is always possible to find reasons why any alternative would be problematical, but problems can be overcome if the educational logic points towards an alternative.

The number of periods abroad, their length and the point(s) at which they occur within the curriculum need to be justifiable in the light of the contribution they are expected to make towards the overall academic, linguistic, cultural and personal learning process represented by the degree course.