A Comparison of Spanish

Second Language Acquisition in

Two Different Learning Contexts:
Study Abroad and the Domestic Classroom
N o r m a n S e g a l o w i t z

Concordia University, Montréal

B a r b a r a F r e e d

Carnegie Mellon University

J o e C o l l e n t i n e

Northern Arizona University

B a r b a r a L a f f o r d

Arizona State University

N i c o l e L a z a r

Carnegie Mellon University

M a n u e l D í a z - C a m p o s

Indiana University

In this paper, we report the results of a study that compared differences in the
linguistic gains made by native English-speaking students from the United States
who were studying Spanish in one of two different contexts of learning. One was a
regular university classroom situation in Colorado; the other was a study abroad pro-
gram in Alicante, Spain. We examined the gains students made on a number of lin-
guistic dimensions: oral proficiency, oral fluency, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation,
and communication strategies. In addition, we investigated the relationships between
these variables and a variety of background factors, including aspects of language
learning readiness. As far as we know, this is the first study to examine such a compre-
hensive array of variables associated with linguistic performance as a function of con-
text of learning. Each of the individual studies that contributed to the full report of

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Segalowitz, Freed, Collentine, Lafford, Lazar & Díaz-Campos

this project can be found in a special issue of the journal Studies in Second Language
Acquisition edited by Collentine and Freed (2004). When those studies are looked at
as a whole, they lead to general interpretations that were not immediately apparent
when considering each of the reports separately. In this paper we review these results,
discuss the larger picture that emerges, and speculate on future questions about the
effects of the study abroad experience on second language acquisition (see also Freed,
Segalowitz & Dewey, 2004, for a related study).
The goals of the original investigation were to address the following three
questions:
1. How did the linguistic gains made by students from the United States in a
study abroad program in Spain compare to those who remained in a regular
academic classroom setting at home in the United States?
2. Were there specific predictors of success for learners in these two contexts of
learning?
3. What was the impact of the special environmental factors normally associ-
ated with the study abroad context, such as housing (home stays), increased
opportunity for out-of-class contact, etc.?
Serious explorations of the linguistic impact of study abroad experiences began to
emerge in the early 1990s, although some articles on the topic appeared during the
previous decade. The most comprehensive published summaries of this research have
appeared in Coleman (1998) and Freed (1995a, 1998). Interest in this topic has been
generated both by scholars eager to explore the influence of the context of learning on
second language acquisition and by program organizers and government agencies con-
cerned with the need for rigorous empirical documentation of the longstanding belief in
the linguistic benefits of study abroad. Advantages claimed for study abroad are gener-
ally based on years’ worth of anecdotal reports about what students gain from being
abroad and to what these gains might be attributed.
Prominent among these beliefs is the assumption that students studying abroad are
“immersed” in the native speech community and that their exposure to the presumably rich
linguistic environment is responsible for potential gains in their use of the target language.
Beyond assumptions, there is also some accumulated evidence to support these beliefs. For
example, there is an influential early report by John Carroll (1967) based exclusively on the
results of multiple choice test scores. There is also a handful of more recent studies, based
either on test scores alone or on student self-reports, and multi-institution, multi-year
studies conducted by Brecht and his colleagues (1991, 1995), on the acquisition of Rus-
sian by study abroad students. In addition, several studies which compare the language
learning of students in study abroad contexts with those in the regular classroom have

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demonstrated increased gains in vocabulary (DeKeyser 1986, 1991; Lennon 1990; Milton
& Meara 1995; Walsh 1994), in the acquisition of sociolinguistic features of the language
(Lafford 1995; Marriott 1995; Regan 1995), and in expression of oral fluency (Freed
1995b, Lafford 1995). By contrast, there has been little support for overall improved
grammatical control on the part of students who have been abroad as compared to those
whose learning is limited to the At Home classroom (Freed 1995b, Möhle, 1984; Möhle &
Raupach, 1983; Regan, 1995). While a few studies have, in fact, demonstrated gain for
isolated syntactic features for Study Abroad students, most of these studies track changes in
the use of specific grammatical features by Study Abroad students but they do not provide
comparative data for students at home (Howard 2001, Isabelli 2002, Lennon 1990).
Of particular interest in the general literature on the nature of gains in the Study
Abroad context are studies which suggest that the overall experience has taken on certain
mythic proportions. Some recent work has suggested that students are not necessarily
“immersed” in the native speech community, that homestay experiences are not necessar-
ily preferable to other living arrangements, that some students do not use the target
language as much as has been believed nor do they consistently avail themselves of the
numerous opportunities to participate in the native culture as we may have expected
(Frank, 1997; Pellegrino, 1998; Wilkinson, 1995).
In addition to studies that have focused on comparisons of language learning in the
study abroad as compared to the home language classroom, several scholars have also at-
tempted to identify predictors of gain abroad. In particular, work by Brecht et al. (1995) has
strongly suggested that students with greater grammatical skill (as measured by SAT-like
tests) prior to going abroad are likely to make greatest gains in oral performance.
Against this background, our team mounted a multi-pronged effort to look at
gains in oral skills over the course of one semester by two groups of students, one study-
ing at home and the other abroad. Our goal in this paper is to present the main themes
that emerged from that larger study (reported more fully in Collentine & Freed, 2004) in
order to raise questions about their implications for study abroad programs.
The research was organized into eight research topics emanating from the three
overarching questions listed above. These touched on the following potential differ-
ences between Study Abroad and At Home learning contexts: Differences in (1) gains
in oral proficiency and oral fluency; (2) the acquisition of vocabulary and grammatical
control; (3) communication strategies used; (4) pronunciation gains; (5) the way cog-
nitive processing abilities related to oral performance gains; and (6) the role played by
extracurricular time-on-task factors in determining gains. Finally, regarding Study
Abroad, we also attempted to learn whether (7) there were specific environmental
factors affecting language gain, such as contact with the homestay family and other
forms of out-of-class contact with native speakers, and whether (8) there was any form

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of preparation (e.g., prior levels of grammatical achievement) that predicted gains.

Below we present the general methodology used in this study and the results in broad
outline form.

M e t h o d

Participants
Forty-six (46) students (M = 22 years; 36 females, 10 males) studying Spanish as
a second language constituted the population for the study. Criteria for participation
included: English as their first language; formal study of Spanish for at least 2 semes-
ters; no prior experience studying Spanish abroad; non-Heritage language speakers;
and no Spanish spoken in their home. Data were included only from participants
completing all questionnaires, tests and interviews. Thus, for some analyses the sample
size dropped to 40.
There were 20 students in the At Home setting, studying at their home university,
at the University of Colorado (Boulder), in the United States. These students were en-
rolled in only one Spanish language-learning class per week focusing on reading, writ-
ing, and speaking skills (typically 3-5 hours per week). The Study Abroad group consisted
of 26 U.S. students (primarily from the University of Colorado), who were commencing
a study abroad semester at the Universidad de Alicante in Spain sponsored by the Council
on International Educational Exchange. These students were enrolled in about 17 hours
of classes per week covering Spanish language grammar and syntax, reading and writing,
conversation and Spanish society and culture.
Testing instruments included questionnaires, interviews and computer-based
tasks. These were administered at the beginning of the semester and again at the end of
the semester, 13 weeks later. These instruments and the measures they yielded are
briefly described below.

Questionnaires
To gather information about various aspects of students’ language history and
use of Spanish during the semester, we administered a detailed language history/
language use questionnaire known as the Language Contact Profile (Freed, Dewey,
Segalowitz, & Halter, 2004) to all students at the beginning and end of the semester
(that is, pre-test and post-test). The 4-page pre-test and 6-8-page post-test Language
Contact Profile were given in English, appropriately modified for the At Home and
Study Abroad contexts. Each language contact question asked students to indicate
how many days per week and how many hours per day they engaged in each of the four
basic language skill activities—speaking, reading, writing, listening—outside class.

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For the Study Abroad group we also obtained a separate measure of time spent with the
home-stay family. Students recorded their current Spanish language courses, provid-
ing information about classroom-based language contact.

Interviews
The ACTFL/ETS Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) was used to gather a pre- and
post-test corpus of oral data (Breiner-Sanders, Lowe, Miles, & Swender, 2000). This
provided an index of oral proficiency on a well-established scale ranging from novice
through intermediate to advanced, with low, mid, and high levels for each. This
interview was conducted at the beginning of the semester (pre-test) and again at the
end of the semester (post-test). The interviews lasted approximately 20-30 minutes.

Oral Fluency
A 2-minute extract of student speech was taken from the OPI at minute 7 and
another 2-minute extract was taken at minute 12 of the interview. Thus four samples of
student speech—four minutes from the pretest OPI and four minutes from the posttest
OPI—were transcribed to paper and digitized for timing analyses that yielded mea-
sures of oral fluency, including speech rate, presence of silent pauses of 400 ms or
longer, and presence of filled pauses (such as ‘ah’, ‘um’, ‘uh’).

Communication Strategies
The interview data yielded examples of how the students handled situations where
communication “breakdowns” or gaps emerged in the conversation with the interviewer.
The communicative techniques the students used to deal with these situations were
classified into categories that reflected various possible strategies for handling such gaps.
The need to use such strategies was expected to decrease with increasing proficiency since
we expected the more advanced students to experience fewer communication gaps.

Pronunciation
We also administered a short read-aloud text at pre-test and again at post-test. The
text contained 60 target words designed to elicit speech samples on specific phonologi-
cal targets typically considered to be markers of English speakers’ accent in Spanish (e.g.,
word-initial stops, intervocalic fricatives, word-final laterals, and palatal nasals).

Vocabulary and Grammatical Skills

We administered the SAT II Spanish Test (the version excluding the listening
portion) to all students in both contexts of learning. This test included 88 multiple-
choice items and was given at the beginning of the semester only. The SAT scores

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provided a measure of the students’ general grammatical knowledge at the beginning

of the research period, allowing us to approximate from norms their initial levels of
knowledge of the language. The eight minutes of oral speech from the OPI data
provided speech samples from which it was possible to analyze specific features of the
students’ grammatical abilities, vocabulary knowledge and changes in these abilities
over the course of the semester. These analyses examined 17 measures of morphological,
syntactic, and morphosyntactic structures at pre-test and post-test, including for ex-
ample, copula accuracy (ser or estar), preposition accuracy, object-pronoun accuracy,
coordinate-conjunction accuracy, subordinate-conjunction accuracy, and subordinate-
clause count, among others.

Computer-based Tasks
Finally, a set of computer-based cognitive tests was included in the battery of
assessment materials. These tasks yielded reaction time measures reflecting speed and
efficiency of visual word recognition or lexical access (ability to recognize the meaning of
a word presented in written form) and language-related attention focusing skills (ability
to shift focus of attention from one language-relevant dimension to another).
In the word recognition test, the students saw a word appear on the computer
screen (e.g., DOG) and they had to judge whether it referred to a living or nonliving
object by pressing one of two reaction time buttons as quickly as possible. This test was
conducted in separate blocks of 100 trials in English and in Spanish.
In the attention-focusing test, there were blocks of attention Shift trials and No-
shift trials in each language. The stimulus words used for these trials were 20 very well
known words drawn from five categories as follows: WHERE? above, inside, near, under;
WHOM? her, him, them, you; WHEN? never, soon, tomorrow, yesterday; HOW MANY? few,
many, several, some; TO BE: are, is, was, were, with corresponding sets in Spanish. These
words and their category membership were studied at the beginning of the test session.
On No-shift trials, the participants saw a category name and three words, each from a
different category. Participants had to press one of three reaction time buttons corre-
sponding to the screen location of the three words (left, middle, right) to indicate
which word belonged the category named at the bottom of the screen. The same
category name was repeated for a run of trials before a new run was begun with a
different category name. On Shift trials, participants saw three words on the screen (and
no category name). On the first Shift trial they had to choose any word by pressing the
button corresponding to its location. On the next trial they saw three new words and
they had to now shift categories by selecting a word that belonged to a different
category from the one they had previously chosen. They continued in this manner,
continuously shifting by choosing a word that differed from the category to which the

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word selected on the previous trial belonged. The difference between performance on
the Shift trials and No-shift trials provided a measure of the participants’ attention
focusing ability (the smaller the difference, the greater the ability).
The measures yielded by these cognitive tests were reaction time, indicating
speed of processing, and variability of reaction time (intra-individual coefficient of
variability), indicating efficiency of processing which has been related to automaticity
(Segalowitz & Segalowitz, 1993). Measures of lexical access and attention-focusing
ability specific to second language processing were obtained by statistically partialling
out performance in English from performance in Spanish. In this way we controlled for
individual differences in task performance that was not related to language as such
(e.g., motor skills, motivation, general intelligence) and for individual differences in
general lexical access and attention focusing ability that would apply to English as
well as Spanish. These cognitive measures tapped language processing abilities that
may be expected to change with experience, rather than reflecting more permanent
language aptitude traits.

Results
Our major findings are summarized below in terms of the three main questions
listed above regarding differences between Study Abroad and At Home learning
contexts. Full statistical details for the results reported below, including corrections for
multiple testing, can be found in the papers cited.

Linguistic Gains
How did the learners in the two contexts compare with respect to the linguis-
tic gains they made? We offer a summary here of the gains made by students in
overall oral proficiency, in oral fluency, and in pronunciation, vocabulary and gram-
matical knowledge.

Gains in oral proficiency and oral fluency

Initial analyses showed that the Study Abroad and the At Home groups did not
differ at the time of pretest on the oral proficiency and oral fluency measures discussed
below. Overall, the Study Abroad group showed gains whereas the At Home group did
not. First, as measured by the OPI, Study Abroad students demonstrated greater gains in
oral proficiency than did At Home students on this holistic measure of oral ability. Overall,
gains were modest but statistically significant, reflecting an increase of about one level
(i.e., a gain from intermediate-low to intermediate-mid). A statistically significant ma-
jority of students in the Study Abroad group gained in oral proficiency (12 out of 22),
(p < .001, Sign Test) while only a minority did so in the At Home group (5 out of 18,

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n.s.) (N = 40 here because 6 did not complete all tests). Second, only the Study Abroad
students made gains as a group in oral fluency. This can be seen in Table 1 below, where
results are shown as effect sizes (the difference between posttest and pretest divided by the
standard deviation of the pretest scores). The Table shows that the Study Abroad group
made gains in the majority of the oral fluency measures—rate of speech, mean length of
utterance without fillers, and length of longest utterance without hesitations or fillers—
whereas the At Home group did not make significant gains. All these results suggest that
the Study Abroad group made important gains in both oral proficiency and oral fluency
gains in Spanish during the one semester abroad in contrast to the At Home group. Gains
were seen especially in terms of increased fluidity in speech defined in terms of absence of
both filled pauses and silent pauses that were unusually long as well as in terms of their
rate of speech (temporal phenomena).

Table 1: Pre-test to Post-test change in measures of oral fluency, At Home and

Study Abroad groups
Effect size* of change
from Pre-test to Post-test
Context At Home Study Abroad
(n=18) (n=22)
Measure of Oral Fluency
Rate of Speech +0.08 +3.37
Mean length of hesitation-free runs -0.31 -0.02
Mean length of filler-free runs +0.38 +0.89
Longest fluent run (free of hesitations and/or fillers) -0.15 +0.72
*Positive effect size changes indicate better performance (faster speech rate, longer utterances).

Grammatical abilities and vocabulary

Analyses of the recorded speech samples suggested that the Study Abroad expe-
rience did not result in overall improved grammatical abilities. As reported in Collentine
(2004), the At Home group, if anything, showed superior gains in grammatical perfor-
mance. These gains were related largely to those aspects of grammar that are particularly
stressed in the Spanish classroom learning, in particular the learning of verb morphology
and subordinate conjunctions (vis-à-vis the emphasis on mood selection accuracy in these
syntactic environments). However, the Study Abroad students demonstrated an increased
ability to generate more instances of narrative discourse than did At Home students. That
is, they were better at concatenating subordinate clauses and using words that were
informationally rich (nouns, attributive adjectives and multisyllabic words). Using five
variables that Biber (1988) identified as those most frequently associated with narrative
discourse—past tense-verbs, third-person morphology, past participles, present parti-

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ciples, and verbs of communication and events—Collentine computed narrative scores

by summing each student’s use of these variables at the time of pretest and posttest. As can
be seen in Table 2, the Study Abroad students made greater gains in this ability than did
the At Home students. Collentine also reported that narrative scores did not correlate
with speech rate measures of fluency, indicating that the increased narrative scores of the
Study Abroad students cannot be attributed solely to their increased oral fluency. For
fuller details of the grammatical and vocabulary analyses, see Collentine (2004).

Pronunciation

Table 2: Pre-test to Post-Test change in measures of narrative ability

Effect size* of change

from Pre-test to Post-test
Context At Home Study Abroad
(n=20) (n=26)
Narrative Score -0.13 +0.59
*Positive effect size changes indicate better performance (faster speech rate, longer utterances).

The Study Abroad students did not, in general, demonstrate greater gains than
the At Home group in terms of increased native-like pronunciation of the targets that
were included in this study. Overall, learners in both groups showed gains in the
pronunciation of some targets (e.g., in voiceless initial stops and word-final laterals)
and not in others (e.g., intervocalic fricatives) over the one semester that testing took
place. There was no obvious advantage to the Study Abroad group. For fuller details of
the analyses of the read-aloud/pronunciation test, see Díaz-Campos (2004) and Díaz-
Campos and Lazar (2003).

Communication strategies
Overall, the students in this study were found to use 26 different communica-
tion strategies. However, the vast majority of communication strategies were con-
fined to just a few of these. Among the more frequently used strategies were those
that involved self-repair and accuracy checks on the learner’s own speech, and re-
structuring. At the beginning of the semester, the mean number of tokens of such
communicative strategy use was 44.80 per 500 words of speech for the At Home
group and 33.96 per 500 words of speech for the Study Abroad group (by the end of
the semester, the corresponding means were 32.35 and 15.35). These communica-
tion strategies can be classified in various ways according to their nature. Table 3

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shows the mean total number of communication strategies used at the end of the
semester by students in the At Home and the Study Abroad groups and the mean
number as a function of language (first versus second language based), type (direct
strategies involving intentional reformulation to get the meaning across versus inter-
actional strategies involving cooperative exchanges with the interlocutor such as
requests for clarification), and source (resource deficit reflecting a lack of knowledge,
other performance reflecting a problem perceived in the interlocutor’s speech, or a focus
on the learner’s own performance). In every case, the Study Abroad group used signifi-
cantly fewer communication strategies at the end of the semester than did the At
Home group, as was borne out by analyses in which performance at pre-test was
covaried out from performance at post-test. For fuller details of the analyses of the
communication strategies, see Lafford (2004).

Table 3: Post-test use of communication strategies (normalized over 500 words)

Context At Home Study Abroad
(n=18) (n=26)
Overall use of communication strategies 32.35 15.35
Communication strategies grouped by:
Language
First language-based (English) 3.81 0.78
Second language-based (Spanish) 28.51 14.52
Type
Direct 28.04 10.75
Interactional 9.28 4.55
Source
Resource Deficit 9.28 3.68
Own accuracy check 2.78 0.95
Focus on own performance 19.42 10.66

Predictors of Language Gains

Beyond the question of whether differential linguistic gains were made by
students in the two learning contexts, we were also interested in identifying factors
that might predict such gains. The following three categories of predictors were exam-
ined: (a) Cognitive processing abilities (speed and efficiency of lexical access and
attention control); (b) Time-on-task measures, including time reported spent using
the target language out of class; and (c) Prior experience learning Spanish and prior
knowledge of the language at the time of pre-test. In our study we were able to identify
pretest variables that were significantly associated with, and in this sense predicted,
post-test outcomes; however, it is not possible to establish causal relationships by
means of such correlational analyses alone (see Lazar, 2004, for discussion of this issue).

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Cognitive processing abilities

Several interesting results emerged from the analyses of the cognitive vari-
ables. First, the measures of speed of visual word recognition (lexical access) and
efficiency of visual word recognition (automaticity) correlated significantly with
oral fluency in terms of mean run length free of filled pauses (r >.37 in each case, p <
.05). It is important to note here that for these correlations the measures of second
language visual word recognition were obtained by first partialling out perfor-
mance in first language visual word recognition. This means that the relationships
obtained in this study between oral fluency and cognitive processing measures were
specific to the participants’ functioning in the second language rather than due to
trait characteristics of the learners (such as their general ability to access meaning,
regardless of language). These results confirmed that speed (based on reaction time
of task performance) and efficiency (based on intra-individual variability in speed
of performance) of word recognition are important components of oral fluency. Also,
as can be seen in Table 4 below, learners in both groups made significant gains in
speed and efficiency of second language word recognition from pre-test to post-test.
There were no significant differences between the groups in the size of these gains
(effect sizes for these gains in the second language ranged from +0.87 to +1.40).
Finally, to see if initial levels of cognitive processing were related in any way to gains
in oral proficiency (OPI), the second language-specific measures of lexical access
speed and efficiency were submitted to analysis of variance with the between group
factors being Context (At Home, Study Abroad) and Oral Gain (Gain, No gain)
(gain here was defined as obtaining a higher OPI rating at post-test compared to
pre-test). These analyses yielded significant main effects indicating that students

Table 4: Pre-test to Post-test change in speed and efficiency of visual word

recognition

Effect size* of change

from Pre-test to Post-test
Context At Home Study Abroad
(n=18) (n=22)
First Language (English)
Speed of visual word recognition +0.52 +0.68
Efficiency of visual word recognition +0.27 +0.49
Second Language (Spanish)
Speed of visual word recognition +0.87 +0.90
Efficiency of visual word recognition +1.40 +1.12

*Positive effect size changes indicate better performance (faster, more efficient).

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who made oral gains had started out with superior lexical access abilities in the second
language. There were no significant effects related to context of learning. The Gain
group result is consistent with the idea that perhaps some initial threshold level of
basic word recognition processing abilities are necessary for oral proficiency and oral
fluency to develop.
Gains in attention control did not correlate significantly with any of the mea-
sures of oral fluency. However, one interesting result was that, for the whole sample (n
= 40), post-test efficiency of attention control (where efficient attention control is
reflected in intra-individual low reaction time variability on the attention shift test)
was correlated significantly and negatively with post-test rate of speech (r = -.476, n =
40). The attention measure here was obtained by partialling out attention performance
in the first language, so this variable reflected abilities specific to the learners’ second
language skills and not general trait abilities to control attention. This result indi-
cated that at the end of the semester the greater a learner’s efficiency in shifting atten-
tion, the slower that person’s rate of speech.

Time-on-task
Analyses were conducted on time-on-task as reflected in reported number of
hours per week spent engaged in extracurricular activities in the four skill areas—
speaking, reading, writing, and listening. None of the correlations between reported
amount of activity using Spanish outside of class with gains in oral fluency and gains
in the OPI measure of oral proficiency were significant. Overall, these results suggested
that time-on-task considerations did not play a major role in the superior gains in oral
proficiency and fluency by the Study Abroad students. However, Lafford (2004) found
a significant negative correlation between time-on-task and the use of communication
strategies by the Study Abroad group.

Prior knowledge and experience learning Spanish

Finally, we examined whether measures of prior knowledge and/or experience
in learning Spanish predicted fluency gains. The results of the Spanish grammar
SAT indicated at the time of pre-test, the At Home group obtained a mean SAT score
of 513 placing them, according to norms, at the beginning of a third semester
university-level Spanish course in the United States whereas the Study Abroad Group
obtained a mean score of 442, placing them slightly before the middle of the second
semester in ability level. This initial difference favoring the At Home group was
statistically significant. Despite this difference, neither the pre-test grammar SAT
scores nor years of previous study of Spanish correlated significantly with language
gains.

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Special Characteristics of the

Study Abroad Context
Additional analyses were conducted with the data from the Study Abroad group
to see if the environmental characteristics available in the context – home stay oppor-
tunities, exposure to Spanish outside of class – conferred any advantages to the stu-
dents. Only the following statistically significant patterns were found. As reported in
Lafford (2004), the use of communication strategies correlated significantly and nega-
tively with the amount of time Study Abroad students reported using Spanish outside
the classroom (r = -.760, p < .001) and with the amount of time they reported speaking
with their host families in the home stay environment (r = -.469, p = .016), indicat-
ing that the more students took advantage of these features of the learning context, the
less they had to rely on communication strategies to handle information gaps. These
results also support the idea that the more students communicated on a regular basis
with native speakers, the more they became attuned to the pragmatic demands of a
communicative context, which may have decreased the likelihood of communication
gaps and hence the need to resort to communication strategies (Lafford, 2004).
Analysis of how the cognitive variables related to reported language use in the
Study Abroad setting also yielded an interesting result. In the Study Abroad group,
gains in speed of attention control correlated significantly and negatively (r = -.523, n
= 19) with reported amount of language contact with the home stay family. This result
indicates that the more students reported speaking with the host family the less they
developed attention control in Spanish.

Discussion
The general findings of the various parts of this complex study may be summa-
rized as follows. First, students who spent a semester studying in Spain were found to
have made greater gains in oral proficiency and in several aspects of oral fluency com-
pared to those who studied at their home university in the United States. Interestingly,
however, these results could not be attributed simply to the fact that the students in Spain
spent a greater amount of time out of class using Spanish, as reflected in the fact that
variables related to self-reported time-on-task did not correlate positively with gains.
Second, the study abroad students appeared to have developed superior narrative
discourse abilities. They also learned how to maintain a conversation with native
speakers with less frequent need to resort to communication strategies to compensate
for linguistic gaps in their conversation. In these respects, the findings are consistent
with the anecdotal, and sometimes documented, experiences of other Study Abroad
students. These results help to explain why it is commonly believed that students who
go abroad make greater progress than their peers at home – quite simply “they sound

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better.” The gains in reducing dependence on communication strategies appeared to

be directly related to the degree to which students took advantage of the special
opportunities afforded by the study abroad setting to speak with native speakers of
Spanish. What might also contribute to this finding is that Study Abroad learners
return producing more ‘lexically dense’ words (e.g., nouns, attributive adjectives) in a
given sentence/phrase than their At Home counterparts.
Third, when discrete features of the language of these Study Abroad students
were analyzed, we found that in certain areas they did not make significantly greater
gains than their peers at home. In fact, analyses done at the end of the semester revealed
that sometimes their abilities were markedly less than those of the At Home students.
For example, in their control of numerous aspects of Spanish grammar, the Study
Abroad students’ skills often declined in the course of the semester when compared
with At Home students. Indeed, the major differences between the two groups related
precisely to those grammatical aspects that Spanish formal instruction emphasizes
(with the At Home students performing better). Moreover, pronunciation of selected
features of Spanish phonology was not more accurate for Study Abroad students than
for At Home students.
Fourth, there emerged some complex relationships involving some of the cogni-
tive variables. We found, for example, that students who made gains in oral proficiency
started out with significantly faster and cognitively more efficient second-language-
specific abilities in word recognition, suggestive of a cognitive threshold for second
language learning readiness. We also found that, for the Study Abroad group, gains in
speed of attention control (gains in how fast the learner could shift focus of attention)
correlated negatively with the reported amount of contact with the home stay family. This
was perhaps our most surprising finding. Such a result could reflect the possibility that
conversations in the home stay context tended to be brief and formulaic (restricted to
greetings, simple chitchat, etc.). If this were the case as some have suggested (Frank,
1997; Wilkinson, 1998), students may not have been challenged to develop attention-
related skills as they might otherwise have been.
In interpreting these results, we suggest the possibility of a consideration that
has, as yet, been unexplored within the field of second language acquisition. The more
the adult learner is able to communicate in the target language the more he or she will
do so. As a result, the very act of communicating will further enhance learning, lead-
ing to more communication, which should promote further learning. This feedback
effect is sometimes referred to as reciprocal causation, where the results of learning lead
to consequences affecting the course of learning itself. The feedback loop can, however,
be negative as well. Such negative effects (known in the child reading acquisition
literature as Matthew Effects; Stanovich, 1986; 2000) occur when the learner is unable

14
Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad

to gain sufficient momentum in his or her learning to support engaging in the very
activities that are necessary to promote further learning. It may be that in the early
stages of learning some second language learners lack threshold levels of certain cogni-
tive or linguistic abilities or fail to develop them through experience (e.g., sufficiently
rapid or automatic word recognition or attention control abilities, as seen in this
study). Such learners may become overwhelmed and/or discouraged at later stages
when they cannot meet the cognitive and linguistic demands of communicating in
more natural and complex situations. This might decrease motivation to communicate
with other speakers of the language, resulting in a process that limits continued learn-
ing (the negative feedback loop).
In conclusion, our results indicate that when thinking about what effects study
abroad (or any particular learning context, for that matter) might have on second
language learning, it is very important to consider more than whether students make
greater gains in one environment than in another. Researchers need to look beyond
simple quantitative issues such as how much exposure to the target language students
have or what level of language ability they bring with them to the learning situation.
We need to more fully explore some of the qualitative aspects of learning afforded by a
particular context. This means looking at the nature of the communicative interactions
available to the learner and actually entered into, taking into account all communica-
tive opportunities, including what transpires inside, as well as outside, the classroom.
The act of communicating may itself enhance learning through positive feedback that
not only provides new input (for example, new vocabulary) or confirmatory or correc-
tive feedback, but also strengthens the cognitive underpinnings of fluency develop-
ment, leading to faster and more efficient processing that in turn renders learning even
more effective. It is, therefore, equally important to consider the nature of the learner’s
language learning readiness in terms of underlying processes that support oral fluency.
We need to ask in what ways the learner is prepared for the special challenges presented
by a specific learning context. We also need to consider how those things a student
brings to a learning environment change as a function of the experiences afforded by
that learning environment. These are crucial and complex questions because they
involve interactions between multiple characteristics of the context and of the learner.
Such complex feedback processes make it unlikely that there will be a simple, direct
relationship between amount of exposure to the language and linguistic development,
as indeed was found to be the case in the study reported here. As we gain more knowl-
edge about the dynamic of these complex interactions, it should become easier to make
appropriate fits between learners and learning contexts, and to better understand the
potential influence of one context of learning compared to another on second language
acquisition success.

15
Segalowitz, Freed, Collentine, Lafford, Lazar & Díaz-Campos

Note
This research was funded in part by a grant to Barbara Freed (from the Council
on International Educational Exchange), and in part by grants to Norman Segalowitz
(from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and from the
Dean’s Office, Faculty of Arts and Science at Concordia University).

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