Resumen de L3 English lexico-grammatical growth in at home and study abroad learning contexts
Maria Juan Garau, Joana Salazar Noguera, José Igor Prieto Arranz
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.