This article reports the results of qualitative analyses of data drawn from monthly informal individual interviews of 29 American college students who were spending one semester studying Mandarin Chinese abroad in a program in China. While some data confirm previous findings that some students' identification as Americans was strengthened during…

While study abroad homestays are often credited with providing opportunities for language and cultural learning, at times they can be characterized by communicative, cross-cultural, or interpersonal discord. In documenting these conflicts and their consequences, research to date has relied largely on students' self-reports, often focusing on their…

This study examines the effects of form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisition of subject-verb inversion word order in declarative sentences in German. A group of U.S. college students who participated in a semester-long study abroad program in Germany and were comparable in terms of preprogram oral proficiency levels and accuracy scores in…

Second language (L2) gains during study abroad have been related to several variables including length of stay (Llanes, 2011), language use (Martinsen, Baker, Dewey, Bown, & Johnson, 2010), and social network development (Isabelli-García, 2006), among others. However, most studies have investigated only a few predictors in single study abroad…

Studies have examined various factors that affect pronunciation including phonetic context, style variation, first language transfer, and experience abroad. A plethora of research has also linked motivation to higher levels of proficiency in the second language. The present study uses native speaker ratings and multiple regression analysis to…

The study involved 16 American undergraduate students who used weekly blogs and conducted ethnographic interviews with native speakers to develop their intercultural competence over the course of one semester abroad. Selected blog entries, post-surveys, and final interviews were collected and analyzed to report the findings. The results show that…

This study measures and analyzes improvements in students' oral proficiency during a study abroad semester in Germany. Oral proficiency interviews were conducted with participants before and after the program during three consecutive years. All interviews were assigned official ratings. Usage of two specific grammar structures associated with the…

Within second language education, concern over teachers' content knowledge has typically manifested itself as concern over the teacher's target language proficiency. In increasing numbers, teacher preparation programs are turning to ACTFL's Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) for measurement of this proficiency and using OPI ratings as high-stakes…

This study investigates the relationship between acculturation and language learning during a year-long study abroad program at the pre-collegiate level. The researcher presents the experiences of four U.S. American sojourners to Sweden as case studies. This mixed-methods study looks specifically at students with no prior knowledge of the target…

This study investigates how motivation and interaction shape the speaking proficiency of study abroad (SA) and classroom or at home (AH) language learners. The author administered a motivation questionnaire, language contact profile, and pretest and posttest simulated oral proficiency interview. The data reveal that SA and AH students had similar…

In an effort to understand better how and why accuracy in speaking develops during study abroad, a group of 16 U.S. students of Spanish as a second language were followed during their 6-week program in Argentina. They were interviewed in Spanish at the beginning and the end of their stay, each time followed by a stimulated recall session. They…

This study investigates the role of task-based learning in the study abroad experience in order to enhance interaction with the host family. Tasks were incorporated into a Family Interaction Journal and implemented under four evolving, though different, conditions over a 5-year period. The conditions were: (1) home campus administered/student…

This article explores international student teaching (IST) within the narratives of a prospective language teacher from the midwestern region of the United States. With a focus on one participant, the case study highlights significant factors that relate to the IST experience in Ecuador. A corpus generated from verbal protocols collected over a…

This study investigates whether or not abstract-level linguistic features, not successfully acquired abroad, will be acquired once the advanced language learner returns from a study abroad program and is exposed to linguistic instruction. The goal of the study was to measure the development of the Spanish subjunctive in adverbial clauses collected…

This study investigates the role of social interaction in language gain among study abroad students in France. Using the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI), the Can-Do self-assessment scale (Clark, 1981), a revised version of the Language Contact Profile (LCP; Freed, Dewey, Segalowitz, & Halter, 2001), and pre- and postdeparture…