The Post-Sojourn in Study Abroad Research—Another Frontier

Abstract

The articles gathered in this special issue, under the title "Language and Culture after Study Abroad," derive from papers that primarily addressed the third of the aforementioned sub-themes, whose scope was to explore through empirical research and critical scholarship the afterlife of cultural, intercultural, and language learning on L2 SA programming, when participants return to their domestic universities or workplaces.1 The conference's five sub-themes were chosen specifically because they were sufficiently original in scope to engage anew scholars from across the Modern Languages disciplines, Second Language Acquisition research, and Study Abroad and International Education sectors. There are, in fact, a few more studies than Coleman (2013) lists that have investigated the long-term impact of SA, addressing the experiences of re-entry and/or some length of extended post-sojourn period either as their sole focus or as part of the arc of before, during, and after SA; for these, the terms "post-sojourn" and "after study abroad" might refer to a number of weeks, several months, and/or a year or more (in the following extended list, I have tried to exclude studies whose period of investigation culminates in the immediate end-of-sojourn, which can mean the final days of a program or immediately following the return home).5 These works discuss re-entry support services, reverse culture shock, feeling more international and/or being between cultures, changes in participants' views and the development of global-mindedness and intercultural awareness (or not), changes in personality (e.g., independence, confidence or self-efficacy, overcoming shyness, flexibility, risk-taking), language acquisition, the willingness to speak the L2 and empathy for non-native speakers of the participants' first language, the development of cultural knowledge of the host country and interest in international affairs, improvement in overall academic performance, the rate of graduation on time, former participants' as advocates for study abroad and language programs (including possibly shifting their own academic focus to foreign languages, if it was not already), civic engagement at home, desire and readiness to travel more, and internationally oriented career choices; as would surely be expected, outcomes vary with the individual.