ABSTRACT
Second language (L2) learners, language instructors, and educational policy makers alike have long viewed a sojourn abroad in an L2-speaking country as an important means to gain L2 proficiency. The unique affordance of study abroad (SA), compared to the foreign language classroom, is that students have the opportunity to use their L2 outside the classroom in a wide range of activities such as conversing with their host family over dinner, obtaining products or information in service encounters, and chatting with a stranger on the bus. As expected, many SA students do develop their L2 skills as a result of a sojourn in an L2-speaking country. However, decades of research on L2 learning in SA indicate that there are considerable individual differences in L2 gains following a period spent abroad: Some students make considerable progress, while others see only modest or even no gains in their L2. This variation can be traced to a variety of factors such as quantity and quality of contact with the L2, length of stay, living situation, density of L2-speaking social networks, and individual characteristics (e.g., proficiency, motivation, gender, age, identity, dispositions). Furthermore, the L2 learning outcomes of a stay abroad are not consistent across all areas of skill or competence: The greatest benefits of SA tend to be observed in oral fluency, acquisition of vocabulary and formulaic expressions, sociolinguistic competence, and—of particular interest here—pragmatic competence (for reviews, see Kinginger, 2009; Pérez Vidal, 2014; Ren, 2015).
