Study Abroad in the time of COVID: (Re)Shaping Language Learning Affordances

Abstract

This paper is a longitudinal qualitative study exploring the experiences of ten students who embarked on Study Abroad (SA) programmes at a time when restrictions were placed on movement; and access to spaces and people were curtailed. Pre-COVID, SA had often been positioned as the optimal means of ensuring linguistic gains. However, social and spatial restrictions impacted the where, who, why and how of language learning affordances (LLAs). This study aims to analyse the extent to which COVID-19 measures impacted on access to the target language (TL) within the educational environment and how this affected students’ ability to co-construct LLAs.The participants are university students from a range of home and host countries: Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, China, Romania, South Korea and Saudi Arabia. Data were generated via narrative interviews. Each participant was interviewed twice, at the mid-way point of the sojourn and at the end. Data were analysed using the affordance framework proposed by Kyttä (2002) and adapted by Devlin & Tyne (2021).Findings show that access to TL environments fluctuated and was dependent on the ever-changing restrictions in the host country. Being essentially a field of prohibited action, the environment was not conducive in producing potential LLAs and reshaped the type and number of affordances during SA.