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 produce significant gains on most measures, and that proficiency level strongly affects the intensity of learners' progress.

The goal of this study is to investigate the impact of manipulating the cognitive complexity of three different types of oral tasks on interaction. The study first considers the concepts of task complexity and interaction and then examines the specific studies that have looked at the effects of increasing task complexity on conversational interaction. In the experiment, learners of English as a foreign language organized into 27 dyads carry out three different types of tasks: a narrative reconstruction task, an instruction-giving map task, and a decision-making task. Two different versions of each task (Robinson 2001a(Robinson , 2003(Robinson , 2005(Robinson , 2007bSkehan and Foster 2001), and how different task types may variously affect the way interaction proceeds during task performance.

This study examines the effects of learning context and age on second language development by comparing the language gains, measured in terms of oral and written fluency, lexical and syntactic complexity, and accuracy, experienced by four groups of learners of English: children in a study abroad setting, children in their at‐home school, adults in a study abroad setting, and adults in their at‐home university. Results show that the study abroad context was superior to the at‐home context, and more advantageous for children than for adults in comparative gains, although adults outscored children in absolute gains. The interaction between learning context and age suggests that studying abroad was particularly beneficial for children, who also had more opportunities for oral language practice.

Analyzing the effect of context of second language learning: Domestic intensive and semi-intensive courses vs. study abroad in Europe This study examines the second language (L2) written and oral performance of three groups of Spanish-speaking university students after being exposed to English in different contexts. One group of learners was spending some time abroad (Erasmus students in the UK), and two groups were following classroom instruction in two different types of intensive courses in Spain: "intensive" and "semi-intensive". The learners' L2 written and oral production was analyzed at different time points through different measures of fluency, syntactic and lexical complexity, and accuracy. The main objective of this study was to compare the performance of the students abroad with each of the two intensive programmes. According to the results of the statistical analyses, after an equivalent period of exposure to the L2 in the two contexts, the students abroad outperformed the learners in the "at home semi-intensive" programme in the post-test in some of the variables under study, namely fluency and lexical complexity. Nevertheless, the students' written and oral performance after an intensive course at home and after the equivalent time abroad was similar.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the progress of 14 Spanish-speaking learners of English during a period abroad from a longitudinal perspective. Oral and written data were collected three times during an academic year at a British university. These samples were analyzed in terms of fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical richness, and accuracy. The results of the statistical analyses indicate that, while a few months abroad might be sufficient for some gains in oral performance to occur, improvement in written production is slower and does not seem to take place until students have spent more than one semester abroad. In addition, it was observed that the type of interaction experienced abroad and some attitudinal features can partly explain language development in some areas.