ABSTRACT
This book is based on a qualitative case study research project, which examined multilingualism and additional language learning among African American college students on a study abroad program in Brazil. It was interpretive, in that I sought to understand the complex, dynamic nature of language learning through the exploration of the meanings that those engaged in this enterprise assigned to it, fi ltered through the greater social, symbolic, and material world. Additionally, I looked at how both the study participants and I, the researcher, collaboratively constructed the reality of the language learning activities and interactions. The study was primarily descriptive with the intention to make proposals for pedagogical and programmatic change based on insights from the project. Also, as Coleman (2013) did when looking at British graduate students in Senegal, I endeavored to “embrace whole people and whole lives” and explored facets of the study participants’ identities and experiences beyond their designation as “learners” (p. 30). Multilingual classrooms and other language learning contexts are not self-contained and isolated from our world. Therefore, I conducted this study oriented by a critical approach to language research (Pennycook, 2001; Alim, 2010), which examines how the social and historical relations among interlocutors impact language practices and linguistic interaction, accounting for the reproduction of societal systems of power, inequality, domination, and resistance therein. This approach serves ultimately to do something about the problems we see, or, as van Dijk (1993) idealized, to bring “change through critical understanding” (p. 252).
