Presented by A. Renee Gutiérrez

At Longwood University, Modern Language professors assess our study abroad program with a two-tiered project. Students begin by keeping journals while overseas, and then during their Senior Seminar, they use the journal materials as the basis for a reflective paper or project. Our assessment evaluates the final project. In designing the journal prompts, however, Dr. Gutiérrez encountered a fascinating collision of teaching and learning best practices in the foreign languages. Questions derived from faculty discussion included: 1) should students be writing their journal entries in the target language (the foreign language) or in their native language (often English) and 2) are there differences in the quality of journal reflection in their native or foreign language. She designed a qualitative research study using a form of grounded theory to evaluate these two approaches. While the data are too preliminary to offer firm conclusions, Dr. Gutiérrez evaluates what has been learned so far and how it might shape the on-going study. From this initial research, one emergent theme (lack of vocabulary) is intriguing because it occurs only when the students are writing in Spanish about a successful conversation. Three new considerations for coding and analyzing data are: how to handle ambiguous text due to language errors, losing nuance due to a lack of vocabulary in the foreign language, and the effect of a slower writing speed and shorter texts in the foreign language journals.

Gutierrez_Presentation_MOLA Assessment

Dr. Renee Gutiérrez earned her PhD in Spanish Literature at the University of Virginia. Her literary research and publications have focused at various times on the Spanish Golden Age and the Enlightenment period, but rarely stray from the topic of epic poetry. Her newest field of study began with a curiosity about what impact study abroad might have on pre-service teachers. She has since been drawn into the world of qualitative research to consider what happens to students’  learning and self-perception when they are immersed abroad, and is intrigued by questions of intercultural competencies and their long-term impacts.