Learning Chinese through Contextualized Language Practices in Study Abroad Residence Halls: Two Case Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT A key question about study abroad concerns the relative benefits and qualities of various living arrangements as sites for learning language and culture. A widely shared assumption seems to be that students choosing homestays enjoy more opportunities for engagement in high-quality interactive settings than do those who opt for residence halls. However, research on outcomes has to date produced only weak evidence for a homestay advantage, suggesting a need to understand the nature of language socialization practices in various living situations. While a number of studies have examined the nature of homestay interaction, only a few have focused on language use in residence halls or other settings where students may interact with peers who are expert second language users. Informed by a Vygotskian approach to the study of development, this article examines the specific qualities of contextualized language practices through two case studies of U.S.-based learners of Mandarin in Shanghai and their Chinese roommates. In the first case, a friendly relationship emerged from routine participation in emotionally charged conversational narrative. In the second, both participants’ interest in verbal play and humor led to enjoyment as well as profoundly intercultural dialogue. In each case, there is evidence to show that all parties enjoyed opportunities to learn. These findings suggest that residence halls can be very significant contexts for learning in study abroad settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".