The impact of study abroad on Spanish heritage learners’ writing development

Abstract

This chapter fills a void in the research field of Spanish as a heritage language by investigating the effects of an immersion experience on the writing development of Spanish heritage language learners after a semester and an academic year abroad. Previous research on study abroad has primarily focused on second language learners, and only a few studies have focused on students who have spent an entire academic year abroad (see Isabelli-García, Bown, Plews, & Dewey, 2018, for an overview of research on Spanish as a second language in study-abroad contexts). Regarding heritage learners, a much smaller number of studies have examined the experiences of these students in immersion settings (see Shively, 2016, 2018, for thorough reviews); and the literature to date is unclear on the extent to which residence abroad has any measurable impact on different aspects of their linguistic performance. For this chapter, data was collected from 22 advanced Spanish heritage learners who spent a semester or an academic year abroad in Spain. Writing development was assessed based on personal narratives collected at three different times throughout the sojourn abroad. These narratives were analyzed to determine the impact of length of stay abroad on different measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency. Results show an increase over time in syntactic complexity (measured as clauses per T-unit) and grammatical accuracy (measured as percentage of error-free T-units). Findings are discussed in light of previous research on heritage learners' writing development and the potential benefits of an immersion setting for language learning.