Group Member 3

Name:

SEMH CELEP

Sub-Category Research
Area:

High School Exchange Programme

Information Source #1
Title:

Learning mobility: high-school exchange programs as a part of

transnational mobility.

Notes
:

. Especially for younger people from the education-oriented middle class, it

has become a normal option to spend a certain time in another country.
The reasons are manifold .Some see it as a career option or CV-booster
,some as a way to learn another language or to have anointer cultural
experience ,and some even as a way to have the time of their lives
.Depending on the destination, what to do there and the person conducting
the stay abroad, this will be judged very differently.
This paper deals with long-term stays abroad at high-school level in which
students are generally placed in host families and visit school on a regular
basis. They are in most cases between 15 and 18yearsold.Long-term
programs are dened here as lasting from 6 to 12 months, inopposition to
short-term (less than four weeks) and intermediate formats (one to six
months).
-High-school exchange: an elite phenomenon?
Like most types of staying abroad, high-school exchange is to a certain
degree socially exclusive. To understand this, the separation in the German
schooling system has to be explained briey. After four grades of primary
school, most pupils are divided into three separate schooling institutions.
There is the Hauptschule (secondary general school) with grades 59, which
offers a basic teaching level and qualies for unskilled and low-skilled jobs.
In 2010, 17% of all grade 8 students were in Hauptschule. The Realschule
(intermediate secondary school, grades 510) qualies mostly for on-thejob-trainings that lead to semi-skilled jobs, with 25% of all grade 8 students
in 2010. The highest secondary school is the Gymnasium (grammar school,
grades 5 12/13), which renders the Abitur, the general higher education
entrance qualication. 36% of grade 8 students went there in 2010 (KMK
2011).

PR2 Research notes and summaries

Information Source #2
Title:

Language Learning and Acculturation: Lessons From High School and GapYear Exchange Students

Notes
:

When it comes to language learning, one often assumes that studying

abroad will result in the development of superior language skills. One may
often view a semester or year abroad as the capstone experience in one's
career as a foreign language learner.
Extended and continuous contact with host nationals 2 puts exchange
students in a position to experience changes in behavior, values, emotions,
and language.
Pre-collegiate exchange students are generally afforded increased
opportunity to interact with native speakers of the target language because
they reside in a homestay environment and participate in a mainstream
high school classroom. As a result, the high school or gap-year student is
submersed in the target language community in a way that the collegelevel sojourner often is not (Marriott, 1995).
As Lapkin, Hart, and Swain (1995) pointed out, living with host families and
attending public school provide students with one-to-one contact, resulting
in a more intense cross-cultural experience.
The ndings of this study support the notion that language learning is
indeed inuenced by acculturation and, more specically, relationships with
host nationals.
The rst research question asked what linguistic gains were made by
exchange students without previous target language ability. This study
shows that absolute beginners can make gains comparable to and even
surpassing those made by sojourners with a formal background in the
target language, as shown in previous studies (Freed 1995a).

Information Source #3
Title:

Students and host families needed for exchange program.

Notes

The American International Youth Student Exchange Program is a non-prot

PR2 Research notes and summaries

high school foreign exchange program in the United States.

It is also seeking American high school students age 15-19 who would like
to spend a high school semester or year with a European family, or to
participate in a four or six week family stay abroad in the summer.
Student are screened by The American International Youth Student
Exchange Program school counsellors and educators in the local schools.

Information Source #4
Title:

Lyceum 1511 and Mountain Crest High School: An International Exchange

Program Reveals Educational Contrasts

Notes
:

Mountain Crest High School, located in rural Cache Valley, Utah, eighty-ve
miles north of Salt Lake City, is composed of 1,460 students in grades 1012.
Lyceum 1511 is a high school of four hundred studentsin grades 10 and 11,
located in a densely populated area on the fringes of Moscow.
To become effective facilitators of international exchange programs,
teachers and administrators need to understand the time, energy, and
expense necessary to establish and then maintain a program.

Information Source #5
Title:

GLOBALISM ON THE HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL

Notes
:

They built the exchange of students and faculty into the program so that
that study could be conducted on a rst-hand basis. Today, ten "sibling
schools" in eight counties participate in the program.
The community is mostly Caucasian, with a school population of 98.6
percent white students, .2 percent black, .4 percent Hispanic, .7 percent
native American, and .1 percent other. As the program developed, it came
to be seen as a way to enlighten our nearly homogeneous school and
PR2 Research notes and summaries

community about issues of diversity and globalism. The district wanted to

take a multicultural approach to respecting differences.
The rst schools involved were the Ostsee-Gymnasium in Germany and a
school in Torcy, France. Two Canadian schools in Mississauga, Ontario, then
joined the program, and those four schools formed the program's nucleus.
Others quickly followed.
Exchanges between Lew-Port and each of its foreign siblings had been
accomplished, and return visits enjoyed. Among the exchanges, the
community has hosted students from Germany, France, and Belarus, and
Lew-Port students and staff are planning to go to the sibling schools in
those countries during school vacations and the summer. Last summer,
Lew-Port students visited Japan, Belarus, and Australia. Discussions are also
under way to create a sibling relationship with a school in east Africa.

Information Source #6
Title:

Longterm effects of international educational youth exchange

Notes
:

Motives for program participation For most respondents, the decision to

participate in an exchange was primarily their own idea. Parents and
teachers were also inuential.
Anticipated and experienced difficulties Among both samples, there was a
moderate-to-high tendency to experience more difficulty in those areas that
one was worried about prior to the exchange: homesickness, loneliness,
inadequate host language ability, inability to make friends, cultural
blunders and prejudices by host country nationals.
Host family placement The more positive ones relationship was with the
host family, the more one attributed positive impact to the exchange.
Perceptions of the host country For both Germans and Americans,
evaluation of the exchange experience is more closely linked to liking or
disliking the host country as a nation rather than to a regard or liking of
individual members of the host country.
Overall evaluation of the exchange experience The large majority of
participants in both national samples (approximately 90%) rated the
exchange experience positively. Americans and Germans had in common
the ve categories of evaluation with the highest frequency of responses

PR2 Research notes and summaries

PR2 Research notes and summaries