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EXTRAMURAL ENGLISH ACTIVITIES AND INDIVIDUAL LEARNER DIFFERENCES
The emphasis was on showing our language skills: there were different tasks, like,
they asked questions in English about what we had seen and found out about
different objects in a museum, and we had to prepare an essay about them by the
end of the school term.
A participant, Charlie, had the chance to take part in a secondary school
exchange program which allowed him to go to Sweden for a week. Since he
speaks a little Swedish, it would have been straightforward to use and practice
his Swedish, but they used English as acommon ground. In his words: “I don’t
speak so much Swedish, and, well, [...] they also spoke English... and everyone
spoke English”. It was probably easier for him to speak English than Swedish
as his proficiency in English is higher, and this may have required less effort.
In intercultural contexts, English often serves as a common ground between
speakers with different L1s, enabling them to make new connections or even
friendships (cf. Clément—Kruidenier 1983). Also, peers and friends can con¬
tribute significantly to maintaining learners’ L2 learning motivation, too (Root
1999), as people are more motivated to learn and use an L2 if they can com¬
municate with someone they like.
Similarly, Sandra defined situations with non-native speaker interactions
as “interesting.” In her words: “I think it’s interesting to talk to non-native
English speakers. We speak the same language, but in a different way”. To some
extent, she is clearly aware of the fact that non-native speakers of English use
the language differently from native speakers. Vera talked about her school
trip organized by her secondary school to Slovakia:
During a field trip, we got lost. It took us three attempts with three different people
to get directions back to our accommodation that we could actually understand.
We probably made lots of mistakes while asking for directions.
Even though the explicit purpose of this trip was not to practice English,
the common ground for students from Hungary and the local people in Slo¬
vakia was English, as this was the only way to communicate with one another.
This resonates with the literature that people with different L1s often use
English as a lingua franca to make themselves understood (Crystal 2003, De
Wilde et al. 2019, Djigunovic 2018, Sauer-Ellis 2019, Sayer-Ban 2014, Sundqvist¬
Sylven 2014, Sylven-Sundgvist 2012).
Participants also often went on private trips with their parents. During these
journeys, most students had to use English for communication purposes. Some
students did not, either because they were relatively young or because their
proficiency in English was not as high as it was at the time of the interview, or
somebody in the family spoke English and undertook the role of interpreter
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