“I am going abroad to study English”: language learning beyond words and grammar

Abstract

Studying abroad, and particularly in an English-speaking environment, has become very popular among English learners in the last few decades. Every year, thousands of students leave their own countries to start or to continue their university studies in an English-speaking context. One of the reasons behind this trend is that living in the target language community, i.e. the country where the language learnt at school is officially spoken, provides them with more opportunities to learn a language than in their homeland. In fact, there seems to be a general consensus among teachers, students and parents that a period of time spent in the target language community by the ‘instructed learner’, i.e. the student who has mainly studied the language in a classroom setting outside the target language community, is beneficial to the acquisition of a foreign language. Students, upon their arrival in the target language community, often mention that in ...