L3 English Lexico-Grammatical Growth in At Home and Study Abroad Learning Contexts

Abstract

[Abstract] In the present article two different L3 learning contexts are distinguished: formal instruction at the home university (AH) and study abroad (SA). We analyse the effect of both learning contexts on EFL students’ lexico-grammatical development. A study was carried out with 31 subjects in order to compare and contrast their linguistic performance as measured by a cloze and a sentence rephrasing test at three different data collection times: at the beginning of their formal instruction period at the home university (T1), after 80 hours of formal instruction AH and prior to SA (T2), and after a compulsory three-month SA in a target language country (T3). Statistically significant findings were found for L3 learners’ linguistic improvement over time in both learning contexts. Implications of the study are presented and discussed.