There is a lack of research on the impact of study abroad (SA) on the development of L2 English when students study in non-anglophone countries. The aim of the present study is to fill this gap by examining 39 Catalan/Spanish students who, as part of an Erasmus exchange, spent a term at universities in non-English-speaking European countries. In this context, English was used as the vehicular language for their studies and in their daily extracurricular activities when interacting with other students. Our research focuses the impact of this specific type of SA on students' L2 English proficiency, and in particular their writing skills. Before and after the study abroad, students completed the Quick Oxford Placement Test (a general measure of L2 proficiency) and also drafted a short written paragraph in English. Their writing was analysed for syntactic complexity, lexical complexity and subordination. The results show that participants improved significantly after their SA on two out of the four measures: general L2 proficiency and lexical complexity. Though threshold levels of general proficiency have been posited for students' ability to benefit linguistically from SA, in this case, L2 proficiency at the outset of the SA experience was found not to influence the development of writing skills, except on the measure of subordination. Implications are drawn for further research and pedagogic practice in developing English as a lingua franca skills in a European context.
Contribution: An analysis of the extent to which sustainability is present in the syllabi, project briefs, report templates, and student final reports of the three Iberian European project semester (EPS) providers, over a five-year period.Background: EPS is a one-semester capstone project framework that adopts project-based learning and multicultural, multidisciplinary teamwork. Educating engineers for sustainable development requires fostering critical and ethical thinking and a desire for equity, solidarity and preservation of natural resources, and cultural and genetic diversity. Existing engineering capstone design programs emphasize solving real world problems, hands-on training, and soft skills, but few focus on sustainability aspects of engineering design. The three Iberian EPS providers adopt project-based learning and teamwork methodologies, promoting the development of transversal skills and addressing sustainability in a multicultural and multidisciplinary background.Intended Outcomes: To show that the three Iberian EPS providers follow these recommendations and contribute to raising students' awareness of sustainable development.Application Design: The proposed sustainability learning assessment method collects evidence from syllabi, project briefs, report templates, and final reports to extract faculty and student perspectives. The sustainability-related terms collected were processed into word cloud format, allowing a simple and intuitive interpretation of students' understanding of sustainability, and in co-occurrence network format, to understand if sustainability has a pervasive or confined presence within the reports.
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