Practice makes best: contrasting learning contexts, comparing learner progress

Abstract

Undoubtedly, different learning contexts offer different opportunities for foreign language practice. This article focuses on context effects, and reports on the findings of the Study Abroad and Language Acquisition (SALA) project, which has examined in depth the impact of two learning contexts, SA within the European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students (ERASMUS), and formal instruction (FI), on the progress made by advanced level higher education (HE) English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The differential context effects on learners’ EFL relative gains in oral and written skills are thus measured. Following a description of the European multilingual policies in the HE Area (HEA), each context is characterised from a second language acquisition perspective. When such effects on oral skills are analysed for the dimensions of Fluency and Accuracy, higher gains seem to accrue in the SA context than in the FI context in both dimensions, with the exception of phonological perception. When written skills are examined, for Complexity, Fluency and Accuracy, in a similar vein, benefits accrue to a larger extent after the period spent abroad, except for Complexity. To conclude, the overall superior effect on learners’ linguistic progress of the SA context over the FI context is discussed.

Keywords:

• Study Abroad
• formal instruction
• relative gains
• foreign/second language practice

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Joan Carles Mora for his most valuable comments on previous versions of this manuscript and support with the statistics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the Agencia Universitària de Recerca (AGAUR), in Catalonia [grant number 2014 SGR 1563]; and by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [grant number FFI2013-48640-C2-1-P].

Notes

1. ETP have been on the rise, from 700 programmes in 2002 to 2400 in 2008, to 8100 in 2014 with a growth of 500% since 2002 and a peak in 2009, 2010, 21% since then, according to the latest ACA survey on 2600 institutions with an ERASMUS charter throughout Europe (Wächter & Maiwörm, 2014).

2. The Bologna Declaration is a voluntary agreement signed by the Ministers responsible for HE from 29 countries, on June 1999, establishing joint objectives for the development of a EHEA.

3. The larger SALA project included the analysis of long-term effects for which a T4 data sample was collected during the third of the degree programme 15 months after T3 (Pérez-Vidal, 2014a).

4. The larger SALA project also included a second group of NSs of English (N = 29) which provided baseline data against which to interpret the results, relevant in this study for the discussion of written Syntactic Complexity.

5. The CEFR establishes a scale of six levels A1/Breakthrough, A2/Waystage, B1/Threshold, B2/Vintage, C1/Effective Operational Proficiency, C2/Mastery (Council of Europe, 2001).

6. Complexity had been only partially tapped in the SALA project, yielding only moderate improvement (see Mora & Valls-Ferrer, 2012).