“I Thought That When I was in Germany, I Would Speak Just German”: Language Learning and Desire in Twenty-first Century Study Abroad

Expanding Participant Voice Within a Social Justice Framework: A Critical Dialogic Approach

“…As such, the early calls by SA scholars such as Polanyi (1995) are bearing fruit in the renewed and recontextualized emphasis on diversity and inclusion. We see this, for example, in the focused attention on race and ethnicity (e.g., Anya, 2017;Thomas, 2021), gender and sexuality (e.g., Dawson, 2019), and on destabilizing discourses of a monolingual norm and traditional modes of language teaching and learning (e.g., McGregor, 2016). This burgeoning criticality bodes well for enriching our approach to participant experiences of SA and accessing the dynamism of whole people in whole contexts, contexts in which the force of coloniality is often still felt and which cannot be disentangled from hegemonic ideologies and neoliberal discourses (McGregor, 2020).…”

The Ecology of Study Abroad for Language Learning: Synthesis and Interdisciplinary Insights

“…Upon arrival the sojourners' personal characteristics and histories interact with the macro-level discourses and ideologies of the foreign environment. For example, in Jin's (2012) case study of Chinese compliment response strategies, having a Chinese mother seemed to motivate one sojourner to adopt Chinese strategies instead of Western ones (for similar examples, see Kinginger, 2004;McGregor, 2016;Patron, 2007;Pipitone & Raghavan, 2017). These interactions are often similar to those in prior environments since they are influenced and communicated by similar actors, but substantial differences between old environments and the new can make it difficult for sojourners to act with the same competence and confidence as before (Jackson, 2011).…”

“…Deciding how to act or which strategy to follow involves a continuous process of negotiation, where the subject of negotiation is the meaning of action, and the intention of negotiation is for a sojourner's actions to adequately express preferences and goals that are valid to sojourners and others in their environments (Tan & Kinginger, 2013). To make this possible, sojourners also negotiate differences among their own personal values, preferences, and emotions, especially as they see them in the unfamiliar light of a study abroad environment (Bae & Park, 2016;McGregor, 2014McGregor, , 2016Seo & Koro-Ljungberg, 2005). The research has identified several features of negotiation to describe how sojourners become familiar with new environments and start to act confidently and intuitively.…”

“…Recent scholarship in SLA regarding identity was deeply affected by Norton (2013), who challenged the assumption that learner identities are made up of largely static characteristics that interact predictably with other factors. Ecological research in SLA has built on her work and describes learners with multiple identities that emerge from the interaction of micro-level events and macro-level ideologies and discourses (Diao & Trentman, 2016;McGregor, 2016;Shively, 2016).…”

Theorizing Qualitative Interviews: Two Autoethnographic Reconstructions

“…SA researchers have investigated language learners’ identity constructions in interviews and naturalistic interactions (e.g., Diao, ; Fernández, , ; Lee et al., ; McGregor, , , ), but have only just begun to address the reflexive researcher in interviews, perhaps due to a number of unique practical challenges associated with designing and undertaking qualitative research projects in SA contexts. For example, doing SA research may be costly for the researcher since she often has to travel to the location where her participants are studying, sometimes staying for an extended period of time.…”