ABSTRACT
Study abroad programs have been said, even when they are short-period ones, to be highly effective in improving students’ language skills and communicative proficiency. In recent years, various training programs have been offered at many universities in Japan, and our college offers a Summer English Program (SIEP), the two-week-on-campus course at our affiliate school, University of Pittsburg at Bradford in the United States. Until today, in our college, little research has been conducted on students’ changes after coming back to Japan. Our purpose of this study is to investigate how the students’ confidence as their L2 selves and their motivation to learn and use English are strengthened after SIEP. One of the authors (Tomoto) traveled as a tutor of the SIEP in 2018 and observed that there was a big impact of the program on participating students between before and after the program. Although the English levels of the participants were diverse, it was interesting that almost all the students gained more confidence by taking this course and that they became more self-content about their English abilities. In this study, we conducted a questionnaire and interviews to find out what kind of changes have occurred in the students’ motivation for learning English and for their communicative proficiency. We also analyzed the growth of students’ English abilities in both reading and listening skills by the results of the VELC test. We investigated the transition of scores not only by conducting a t-test but also by arguing the background of the students to know why they had a high or low growth rate of the test scores. As a result, we were approaching ways to improve the program for the next fiscal year.
KEYWORDS
Self-Confidence, Study Abroad Program, Language Influence, L2 Self, Motivation