As someone who emphases the benefits of ‘out-of-class learning’ I have a great interest in studies on the effects of study abroad programmes. Common sense would say that such programmes cannot but be beneficial. It was interesting then to attend Robert de Keyser’s presentation last year at AILA as part of a symposium led by Jim Coleman where he reported on a study that showed no benefit. At the time I had some issues with the study, one of them being that the study abroad stay was rather short. To my mind, and in my own experience, there is a considerable ‘gestation period’ before a cascade of progress is set in motion. I vividly remember my study abroad stay in Cairo in the 90s. I had been studying up to 15 hours a day trying to develop my Arabic proficiency with not entirely convincing results. I had made progress at the grammatical and vocabulary level but the different pieces of the puzzle just hadn’t fallen in place; it was all discrete bits. Then one night as I was half-asleep I physically felt something happening inside me, not just in my head but in my whole body, and I knew that something important had changed. To say that the next morning I was able to speak Arabic would be a grave exaggeration but from that day the language (insofar as I had learned about it up to that point) had become internalised and I made tremendous progress.

It was interesting then to read a recent study by Àngels Llanes and Carmen Muñoz who, in contrast to de Keyser, did find a benefit of short-term study abroad programmes. This debate has not been settled yet, but it is certainly an interesting additional data point.

Here is the abstract of the study:

Given that summer abroad programs are becoming more and more popular, the aim of the present study is to find out whether foreign language proficiency can be significantly improved during a summer stay of 3–4 weeks. The present study examines learners’ linguistic gains through oral fluency and accuracy measures as well as a listening comprehension task. Learners’ oral fluency is examined in terms of syllables per minute, other language word ratio, filled pauses per minute, silent pauses per minute, articulation rate, and length of the longest fluent run. The accuracy of learners’ oral production is measured by means of the ratio of error free clauses and the average number of errors per clause. In addition, learners’ errors are classified into 4 categories: morphological errors, syntactic errors, lexical errors and covered errors. Results reveal that these short stays do indeed producfe significant gains on most measures, and that proficiency level strongly affects the intensity of learners’ progress.

System 37, 3. (2009).
doi:10.1016/j.system.2009.03.001