Ideal worlds and real worlds

The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the code-choice practices of a group of US university students studying abroad in Germany, in part in order to gain insights into how those practices might inform our thinking about foreign language pedagogy and teaching practice. The approach taken is an adaptation of Scollon and Scollon's ( 2004 ) nexus analysis, which allows us to examine code choice at the nexus of multiple, intersecting discourses, as one element in the complex system that is the student living, studying and using languages abroad. I will show here that in order to orient pedagogy towards meaningful training in being multilingual, it is useful and productive to consider aspects of second language (L2) learners’ assessments and experiences of using their first and second languages while abroad.

At the start I own up to a certain bias: As a language teacher and a former study-abroad student myself, I envision each student's experience of living abroad in a new language and culture as a series of challenging and meaningful connections with the Other, as the development of intercultural competence comprising new skills, perspectives and forms of critical knowledge (Byram, 1997 ), as ‘immersion’ in the L2 and the multiple worldviews and cultural frames of its speakers in ways that bring the student to critically examine her or his own worldviews and cultural frames. My approach to the design of a language curriculum in German often imagines the students’ study-abroad experience in this way.

The reality of it is, of course, quite different, and immensely variable from individual to individual, which always makes thinking about curriculum and teaching difficult. Some students may not ‘immerse’ themselves in the L2, may not engage extensively with people in the L2 society and perhaps are not as transformed as language teachers or they themselves would imagine or hope for (Kinginger, 2010 ). As participants in the L2 society, they may remain on the periphery, looking in from the outside, not entirely unlike the way they studied the L2 and its culture remotely in the language classroom back home, but now with the unmitigated experience of being there, of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling it first-hand rather than having it mediated through books, recordings and websites.