The number of students embarking on a study abroad experience continues to grow steadily. A new setting for study abroad in English has developed recently where students may be studying in an environment where English is used as a lingua franca but is not an official language of the country. This setting is referred to as English as a lingua…

Time abroad is an ever more common feature of study for many university students. Students of languages, in particular, are encouraged or required to spend a period of time abroad as an integral component of their degree. While research on study abroad is abundant, studies addressing the socialisation of Irish students during their time abroad are…

This study looks into the effect of L2 learning context and different types of L2 exposure on changes in the use of communication strategies (CS). Previous findings on the possible effects of study abroad (SA) experiences on the development of CS do not allow for a clear conclusion on the issue. The present study specifically compares the effects…

While there is ample evidence that study abroad (SA) enhances oral fluency in a foreign language, the effects of different types of learning context on other aspects of oral skills, such as vocabulary use, have not received much attention in academic research and are less clear. The present study tries to fill this void by investigating lexical…

The Erasmus student mobility programme allocates three explicit objectives to the experience of spending a few months studying in another European country: (1) to benefit students educationally, linguistically and culturally; (2) to promote co-operation between institutions and (3) to contribute to the development of a pool of well-qualified,…

This paper contributes to the study of the impact of academic mobility on the development of students' intercultural competence (IC). Following Byram, IC is seen as comprising the three components of knowledge, behaviour and attitude. The study adopts a mixed-methods approach, analysing the results of a quantitative pre-stay post-stay survey…

This paper presents the outcomes of a Spanish study on aspects of the background, skills and perceptions of three groups of teachers -- content teachers, language teachers and language assistants -- working to implement CLIL in the monolingual area of Andalusia, Spain. The research was based on a questionnaire completed by 130 informants and…

The present study examines the effects that a 3-week study-abroad (SA) experience and a set of individual differences have on the foreign language (FL) development of a group of 64 Catalan/Spanish speakers, learners of English as an FL. Moreover, the present study attempts to account for the outcome differences between successful and less…

This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the…

Given the growing importance of English as a lingua franca, this study examines which context (classroom instruction in the students' home country vs. studying abroad in an English-speaking country) better facilitates the acquisition of English by learners of different ages: children, adolescents and adults. Participants (N = 197) completed…

There is a lack of research on the impact of study abroad (SA) on the development of L2 English when students study in non-anglophone countries. The aim of the present study is to fill this gap by examining 39 Catalan/Spanish students who, as part of an Erasmus exchange, spent a term at universities in non-English-speaking European countries. In…

This study examines the effects of foreign language learning context (three-month study-abroad; versus "at-home" instruction) and age (10-11-year-old children versus university students) on the development of effective foreign language communication strategies (CS) in monologue production. Participants (N = 95) were all Spanish/Catalan…