About LANGSNAP: Rationale

Student Mobility in the UK

Student mobility is a key feature of current higher education, and has life changing consequences for participants, as demonstrated in long standing research e.g. on the Erasmus programme. Post-mobility, graduates are exceptionally likely to find international partners and to be professionally mobile, and are “clearly more competent to handle international environments” (Teichler, 2014). However, UK students are somewhat reluctant participants in study abroad (King, Findlay, & Ahrens, 2010; British Academy & University Council for Modern Languages, 2012), and to this extent are disadvantaged from ‘global’ employability.

As documented in our recent Southampton research (e.g. Mitchell et al. 2014), students abroad must now cope with multilingual environments  where English is in widespread use as lingua franca, where travel and communication are cheap, and where virtual and real experiences constantly intermingle (See also Coleman, 2013). They must reflect on and respond to forms of ‘culture’ and ‘community’ which are fast changing and interpenetrating, and to new interrelations between ‘home’ and ‘abroad’. These new conditions have complex consequences for student identity, experience and learning when abroad.

Purposes of the LANGSNAP Guides

The objective of the Langsnap Guides is to provide resources and materials for programme administrators and for study abroad participants; they will:

    • Support participants’ social insertion in both international and local networks abroad;
    • Promote participants’ social engagement and social contribution while abroad;
    • Develop participants’ intercultural awareness and capacity to reflect in a relativistic way on social conditions at home and abroad, and interrelations among these;
    • Develop participants’ capacity for understanding and interpretation of contemporary culture(s) abroad and at home;
    • Develop language learning strategies (including internet based practices) appropriate for mulitilingual conditions.

The highly visual nature of the presentation is intended to appeal to a variety of learning styles, and to grab and maintain the attention of the participants, but we understand teaching styles vary enormously and that learning differences, such as dyslexia for example, require specific alterations such as having dark blue font on a light yellow background. But for this reason, we have given our full licence for facilitators to download the original Power Point and adapt, use or recycle the slides to make them fulfil their own students’ needs, as long as none of the modified version is shared (click here for further information).

Key objectives for these publicly available materials

The main intention to create and share these guides is to support teaching and administrative staff, who are sometimes left with the overwhelming task of preparing students for study abroad but have little or no time to prepare their own materials, and/or who want to make sure the opportunity to talk to these adventurous, albeit sometimes quite naĂŻve future sojourns, is not wasted reinforcing stereotypes or folk beliefs about the potential contribution of a period of study abroad to the intellectual, professional and personal growth of our students.

We hope tutors and administrators will find these materials useful, and more importantly, that as many students as possible can benefit from them. We would love to hear your feedback and stories, and learn how our initiative has evolved and developed in the hands of our colleagues.

Prof Ros Mitchell & Dr Patricia Romero de Mills