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Article published In: Study Abroad Research in Second Language Acquisition and International Education
Vol. 10:1 (2025) ► pp.102–122

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Not just quantity but quality

The link between types of target language use and the development of phraseological sophistication during study abroad

ORCiD logo with link | Radboud University Nijmegen
 | Stockholm University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Radboud University Nijmegen.

Published online: 6 January 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sar.24004.van
Abstract
This study investigates which types of target language (TL) use best explain the development of phraseological sophistication (mean pointwise mutual information of verb + direct object collocations) in argumentative essays written by second language learners of French during a nine-month sojourn abroad. Using data from the LANGSNAP corpus (Tracy-Ventura, N., Mitchell, R., & McManus, K. (2016). The LANGSNAP longitudinal learner corpus: Design and use. In U. Römer & E. Tognini-Bonelli (Eds.), Spanish learner corpus research: Current trends and future perspectives (pp. 117–142). John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), we built a series of regression models to predict development on the basis of the learners’ self-reported social networks and engagement in various activities (e.g., small talk, reading newspapers). Our findings show that quantity of TL interaction and use on their own were not strong predictors of development. Rather, development was related to the types of activities that learners reported being engaging in while abroad, specifically reading. These results shed more light on the development of phraseological sophistication and speak to the importance of connecting linguistic development to the specific activities learners engage in while abroad.
Article outline
  • 1.Background
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1The corpus
    • 2.2Survey data
    • 2.3Analysis
  • 3.Results
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (42)
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Edmonds, Amanda & Aarnes Gudmestad
2025. From stay-abroad research to SLA theory. Study Abroad Research in Second Language Acquisition and International Education 10:2 ► pp. 155 ff. DOI logo

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