UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Celeste Kinginger, Kirby Professor in Language Learning and professor of applied linguistics at Penn State, recently received the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize for her book, “The Professional Lives of Language Study Abroad Alumni: A Mixed Methods Investigation” (Multilingual Matters), which she co-wrote with Jingyuan Zhuang, who received her doctoral degree in applied linguistics from Penn State.
First presented by the MLA in 1980, the Mildenberger Prize is awarded to scholars who produce “outstanding work in the fields of language, culture, literacy, and literature with strong application to the teaching of languages other than English.” Kinginger and Zhuang’s book examined the long-term impact of language learning and international experience on study abroad students.
“The clear message on the value of acquiring a multilingual disposition is highly relevant to the current political and educational climate,” the award’s committee wrote in praising the book. “Appealing to a broad audience, this book can serve as a resource for researchers, teachers, students, and advocates of the value of language learning and study abroad in the 21st century.”
Kinginger and Zhuang, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hildesheim in Germany, received the award in January in Toronto at the MLA’s annual convention.
“For me personally, receiving this award is extremely gratifying,” Kinginger said. “My own doctoral adviser, one of the most admirable people I have ever met, won it in 1983, two years after it was established. The list of other awardees reads like a roll call of my professional heroes, including some whose work inspired my own efforts or who stepped up to assist me at critical moments in my career.”
Kinginger discussed some of the book’s key findings.
Q: How did the idea for the book come about?
Kinginger: In applied linguistics and language education, much of the research on study abroad is about short-term gains or losses in language ability or other related characteristics such as willingness to communicate or psychobehavioral flexibility. Researchers use pre- and post-test designs to test the effects of study abroad one sojourn at a time, as if American students only have one chance to go abroad as learners during their lifetimes.
Personal experience had taught us that international education is far more meaningful than just a score on a proficiency test, and that devoted learners are likely to seek out multiple opportunities for engagement with expert users of their chosen languages. When we designed the study, we were also responding to a small but outspoken group of fellow scholars drawing attention to the lack of inquiry on the long-term effects of language-focused study abroad.
Q: How did you approach the research?
Kinginger: This book is based on a large-scale, mixed methods study funded by the U.S. Department of Education. We began with a nationwide survey recruiting language study abroad alumni of all ages. The survey attracted 4,899 complete responses and 2,741 volunteers for interviews. We believe that this enthusiastic response reflects the pent-up emotions that alumni continue to harbor for many years after their entourage has grown weary of hearing about experiences abroad.
In any case, we obviously could not interview 2,741 participants, so we turned to our colleague Robert W. Schrauf for help in using descriptive statistics to ensure that our selection of interviewees would reflect the characteristics of the entire survey population. For this reason, the study is considered methodologically innovative.
We then collected professional life history narratives of 54 individuals in a wide variety of careers such as education, business, health care, government service, hospitality and engineering — and one young man who has learned Spanish to support a career in Major League Baseball.
Q: What were your key takeaways from the study?
Kinginger: Our findings show that most American language learners are not initially motivated by utilitarian concerns such as meeting a requirement or getting a job. Instead, they are in search of what Claire Kramsch, a past Mildenberger Prize recipient, referred to as “alternative truths that broaden the scope of the sayable and the imaginable,” and that can emerge from exploration of other cultures. It is only later in life that the long-term benefits of international education become clearly perceptible. We can also say that language learning is useful: 65% of respondents claim to use a language other than English at work, and 79% use their additional languages in daily life.
However, there are many other, less obvious benefits associated with this pursuit. Having struggled to express themselves in another language, our participants have developed expertise in speaking English as a lingua franca — or a common language that is not either party's first language; this allows them to succeed in business or other communication in international settings within the U.S. or elsewhere. Our participants also attributed problem-solving, analytic acuity, empathy and keen observation skills to language learning. They describe how these capabilities furthered careers that would appear to bear little relation to the humanities, as in health care, banking and market strategy.
Our research design has also allowed us to show that measuring the outcomes of one sojourn at a time does not in fact reflect the process of language learning from a life history perspective. Just under half of survey respondents had participated in two or more formal programs, and many of our interviewees had combined study abroad with other activities abroad such as government-sponsored internships or scholarships, teaching positions or Fulbright grants. We hope that applied linguistics researchers will begin to take this perspective into account when interpreting the findings of short-term studies.
Q: What's currently on your research agenda?
Kinginger: Last year we published an article examining how program design influences long-term language use. That piece was named “Best of the Modern Language Journal 2024.” We are currently examining how students of less commonly taught languages (LCTLs), such as Arabic, Mandarin and Koren, compare to students of commonly taught languages (CTLs) like Spanish and French, in terms of their dispositions toward learning. LCTL students are reputed to be more purposeful, high-minded and driven than CTL students, but this has yet to be demonstrated empirically. I am also working with Pedro A. de Lima Bastos, my current doctoral advisee, on a paper to do with learning the social aspects of Japanese, French and the Akan languages of Ghana, based on the qualitative data.
In the longer term, I would like to write profiles of very high-achieving American language learners such as the Peace Corps volunteer we interviewed who was raised in upstate New York and became the first adult-onset learner of Korean to qualify as a diplomatic interpreter for the Foreign Service. I am also very interested in the effect of foreign language learning on multilingual dispositions in the workplace; that is, how American language learners improve their use of English for communication with other multilinguals.