Home:
Work
And Study Abroad
Quality Assurance
Index:
Preparing for the next Quality Assessment HEFCE
Quality Assessment reports -positive -negative
Quality Assurance issues to be addressed Objectives:
the Residence Abroad Project Taxonomy Academic
Outcomes Cultural Outcomes Intercultural
Outcomes Linguistic Outcomes Personal
Outcomes Professional Outcomes Curriculum
integration Preparation Support
& Monitoring Debriefing & Follow-up Assessment
Staff development
Preparing for the next Quality Assessment
The HEFCE Quality Assessment process of 1995/96 provided the first opportunity for Modern Language Departments' arrangements for student residence abroad to be externally evaluated. Quite obviously, this will not be the case next time. Whatever form the quality assurance process takes, those responsible for implementing it will inevitably turn to two sources of information: the HEFCE reports of 1995/96 (both individual institutional reports and subject overviews), and the recommendations of the FDTL projects whose explicit task it was to promote the good practices identified by QA assessors, and address the quality issues they raised. This section is designed to provide a summary of the Residence Abroad Project recommendations on good practices.
HEFCE Quality Assessment reports
Subject Overview reports and Institutional reports, which are available in the form of a searchable database on the National Residence Abroad Database website, have provided the following picture for residence abroad provision within the context of HE Languages departments:
- Residence Abroad is a distinctive and valuable experience, the central experience of a modern languages degree
- Effective practical/academic preparation through
- handbooks or videos
- structured meetings/workshops with staff or returners
- TEFL training
- Support for student residence abroad, through
- clear aims and objectives
- staff visits
- local link-persons
- learning contracts
- learner diaries
- post Residence Abroad debriefing and reflection
However, the shortcomings in Residence Abroad provision were identified as the most significant issue of all in UK modern language courses.
Negative
- Preparation is 'minimal' in some cases
- Curriculum integration:
- two-thirds of French and German departments do not successfully integrate Residence Abroad
- there is a particular failure to build on linguistic progress made during Residence Abroad
- Assessment: Residence Abroad results rarely contribute significantly to degree classification
- Support: only one-quarter of institutions visit as a matter of course; others rely on casual contact
Perhaps the most comprehensively negative report was on provision in Spanish and Portuguese, where 'the aims and objectives of the period abroad are not fully identified and explained to students; the assessment, certification, monitoring, quality control and outcomes expected are also often vague and undeveloped. Many institutions are criticised for their lack of design, planning, operation and evaluation of the period abroad and its place within the curriculum as a whole.'
Quality Assurance issues to be addressed
There is no single model of student residence abroad which is suitable for every institution. Many alternative solutions have equal validity. However, to meet quality standards, the following issues must be seen to have been addressed.
- outcomes
- preparation
- support and monitoring
- curriculum integration
- assessment and accreditation
- staff training and development
Objectives: the Residence Abroad Project Taxonomy
From three years' work on residence abroad, we have developed six categories into which, we believe, all learning objectives or outcomes of student residence abroad can be fitted. In alphabetical order, they are:
- academic
- cultural
- intercultural
- linguistic
- personal
- professional
The following paragraphs define these categories in more detail.
Academic Outcomes
Academic objectives typically include
- a course at an L2land university (whether with a prescribed curriculum, a free choice, or - more frequently - a core + options timetable subject to approval by the home institution)
- a dissertation or project, to be handed in at the end of the residence abroad, or else to be researched during residence abroad and written up back in the home institution; such projects, if they have a local focus, can serve the additional purpose of obliging students to make personal contact with the host community, and thus facilitate their insertion into local society
- preparation for final year, e.g. reading set texts
Cultural Outcomes
Cultural objectives may often overlap with academic objectives, particularly if the course has an 'area studies' focus. They embrace the enhanced insight into institutions and the way of life in L2land which most students achieve through residence abroad.
Intercultural Outcomes
The intercultural objectives of residence abroad have received a good deal of theoretical and research attention in recent years, partly through the work of the Council of Europe, the series of Cross-Cultural Capability conferences held at Leeds Metropolitan University, and the recently formed International Association for Language and Intercultural Communication (IALIC).
Intercultural competence is an amalgam of knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, skills, and behaviours. It includes an awareness of the relativity of all cultures - including one's own, and a recognition that culture is a social construct. The achievement of intercultural competence requires both cognitive and affective learning, since it is concerned with elements of personal and social identity. It also embraces the ethnographic skills which allow a student to observe without misunderstanding, and to evaluate with objectivity, free of ethnocentrism; and the interpersonal skills which allow a student to adapt to multiple cultural milieux, respecting local values without abandoning their own.
There is also a work-related aspect to intercultural competence: the ability to function in new linguistic/cultural environment is a skill highly prized by international employers, many of whom will not consider graduates without experience of living and working outside their native land.
Linguistic Outcomes
The linguistic objectives of residence abroad are too often taken for granted. In many cases, of course there are none: students going to the USA, or to a Scandinavian country where all teaching is in English, will not expect any new language skills to be formally assessed.
Even where this is the principal reason for including residence abroad in a degree programme, there is research evidence that linguistic progress is very uneven in such circumstances.
- Overall proficiency improves faster through L2land residence than through L2 tuition in L1land
- Initially less proficient students make faster progress
- Students have false expectations, believing they will integrate easily and their L2 proficiency will increase automatically
- Students who rely on formal language classes do less well than those who are less assiduous but socialise a lot with L2landers
- Interactive contact benefits lower-level learners more than advanced-level learners; receptive contact (TV, radio, books, newspapers, films) the opposite
- In order of average benefit, work placements are preferred to assistantships, with university study least beneficial
- Preparatory training can help by developing students' learning strategies, underlining the need to seek out interactive contact with L2landers.
Certain language skills improve more than others
- little or no morpho-syntactic gain
- big vocabulary gains
- little gain in reading, still less in writing
- big gains in oral-aural skills
- big gains in fluency - speed, self- correction, articulation rate, phonation/time ratio, phonology, communication strategies, filled or reduced pauses
- increased sociolinguistic skills.
Overall, students tend to become more fluent and more acceptable to native speakers, but do not improve their grammatical competence. Progress is linked to attitudes, strategies and behaviour.
Objectives should therefore ideally be couched in terms of discrete competences:
- speaking
- listening
- reading
- writing
- grammar
- vocabulary
- sociolinguistic (register)
- fluency
- language learning strategies.
It may well be necessary to arrange additional work if written and reading skills are to be significantly enhanced.
Personal Outcomes
Personal objectives include independence and self-reliance, increased confidence, and enhanced self-awareness. They are the gains which every residence abroad co-ordinator or tutor has seen innumerable times. They confirm residence abroad as a learning experience in the deepest sense, yet they are as yet rarely made explicit.
Professional Outcomes
Professional objectives include all work-related skills acquired through residence abroad. As well as narrow skills appropriate to the future profession, they embrace generic transferable skills such as working independently and in teams, setting and meeting objectives, time management, problem solving, imagination and creativity. Actual work experience and intercultural competence are important outcomes, as are career management skills ranging from recording evidence of one's own skills to researching aspects of work conventions in L2land.
Curriculum integration
Curriculum integration was, it will be remembered, a central feature of the HEFCE QA recommendations. The taxonomy of outcomes makes such integration simpler. Once they have been decided for a particular course, the list of outcomes or objectives determines the other features:
- preparation (which must of course also embrace practical preparation)
- support and monitoring
- debriefing and follow-up
- assessment
Preparation
Some examples of the form which objective-specific preparation may take
- Academic: research methods, L2land universities, learning contract
- Cultural: L2land institutions, behavioural conventions
- Intercultural: sensitisation, experiential learning, writing a diary, ethnographic project
- Linguistic: language learning strategies, sociolinguistic skills
- Personal: aims, hopes, fears
- Professional: CV, L2 letters, career management
- Practical
Peer contact - departers + students abroad + returners + L2landers - should be a central part of preparation, since students take in more from peers than from academics.
Support & Monitoring
The essential for student support and monitoring is regular contact: visits where resources permit, e-mail (available to 90% of students abroad through the university or cybercafés, or the 'virtual visit' - desktop videoconferencing described elsewhere in the Residence Abroad Project material.
A learner diary, especially where students have acquired some practice beforehand, can follow the different strands - academic, cultural, intercultural, linguistic, personal and professional - of the objectives defined by the course or, after discussion, in the individual learning contract signed before departure. If the diary is regularly submitted (electronically, for example) then it can serve as a real record of the process of learning, rather than a rather artificial and post hoc product. Increasingly, universities set up a dedicated website for communication between the different groups of students (departers, those abroad, returners) sharing in the experience.
Debriefing & Follow-up
The debriefing is a central feature of good residence abroad practice which is covered in detail elsewhere. It should cover all the outcomes or objectives defined in the learning contract and traced through the learner diary. It may well contribute to the essential peer contact (departers + abroad + returners + L2landers), perhaps through presentations, meetings or joint realisations (booklets, videos) by returners. Debriefing validates the students' experience by confirming the importance which staff at the home institution attaches to it, helps advance the process of reflection and making sense of experience which completes the learning through residence abroad, helps provide strategies for students to consolidate and retain the linguistic and professional gains made, can contribute to assessment (especially, in conjunction with a diary, of personal gains which are hard to access otherwise), and informs future institutional practice by providing feedback on what aspects of preparation and support need modification.
Assessment
Good practice suggests that the achievement of each specified outcome or objective should be assessed, where this can be done equitably and practically. The assessments, their purpose, their form, and the criteria to be used must all be clear to students. Given the diversity of student experience during residence abroad - in a university or work placement, in one country or two, over differing periods of time - and given the different individual objectives which may be embodied in a learning contract, it makes sense to match the assessment to the individual, and to draw on as many sources of information as possible to increase the validity and reliability of the assessment. For example, contributory marks might be awarded on the basis of an oral exam, a written project, an employer's report, ECTS grades from the host university, the learner diary, the debriefing, etc. The weighting given to the six different categories might vary according to the particular form of residence abroad, as in the following illustrative table.
|
ERASMUS student
|
Work placement
|
|
| Academic |
40%
|
10%
|
| Cultural |
10%
|
10%
|
| Intercultural |
10%
|
10%
|
| Linguistic |
20%
|
20%
|
| Personal |
10%
|
10%
|
| Professional |
10%
|
40%
|
Staff development
Residence abroad is a far more complex matter than it was once considered to be, and staff development is desirable. During the academic year 2000/01 the Residence Abroad Project piloted a course on Supporting Residence Abroad which was delivered entirely online, and successful completion earned 20 credit points at M-level. While the course is no longer on offer, you can contact Jim Coleman for further information.
Prof. James A. Coleman
University of Portsmouth, 2000
edited by Artie Vossel-Newman, 2001