This study investigated the effects of two study abroad contexts on L2 oral development through complexity, accuracy, and fluency measures depending on language orientation of the sojourn country. The results lead us question the necessity of Anglophone study abroad compared to the English as a lingua franca sojourn context.
Scholars have reported numerous benefits of SA on oral measures, such as fluency, accuracy, and complexity (Pérez-Vidal, 2014). However, very few studies have attempted to categorize the SA in Europe as Anglophone and non-Anglophone when it comes to learning English as an L2 considering European mobility schemes (Köylü, 2016). Given the lingua franca status of English, this new non-Anglophone context is operationalized as English as lingua franca study abroad (ELFSA) in the current study, the effects of which have not yet been studied in SLA to date. Motivated by this gap in the literature, this longitudinal study investigated the effects of the two study abroad contexts as SA and ELFSA on oral development as compared to the at home context. The participants were 33 Turkish undergraduates, all of whom took the ERASMUS semester either at a university in England or a European country where the native language is not English. Following a quasi-experimental design, the oral data were collected via an elicited imitation test (Ortega et al., 1999) to tap proficiency and a spoken task to determine linguistic complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) gains. All the data were coded into the CHAT format following annotation conventions by Hilton (2009) via CLAN (MacWhinney, 2000) to facilitate CAF measures. Oral fluency was determined through utterance fluency measures categorized as speed fluency, breakdown fluency, and repair fluency. As per results, no significant interaction effects were found between the SA and the ELFSA on spoken fluency, yet the latter group had the highest mean gains in terms of two subconstructs; breakdown fluency and speech rate, suggesting the ELFSA participants had less hesitation and faster oral production after a semester abroad. The results help us question the scope and necessity of SA and if Anglophone SA contexts have any additional benefits over the English as a lingua franca context in Europe in terms of oral L2 development.
