Abstract

   Although study-abroad experience has been shown to be beneficial in foreign-language learning, we still do not know whether such beneficial gains will last in the long run (Llanes & Muñoz, 2013). This study examines whether prior study-abroad experience in an English-speaking country (ESC) during childhood can show long-term linguistic advantages even after return to the home country. The study was conducted in Saudi Arabia with 48 adult Saudi Arabic EFL speakers. They were divided into two groups based on the context at first exposure: study-abroad in an ESC (n=26), and domestic study in Saudi Arabia (n=22). In addition to the context of exposure, two additional experiential factors were examined: age at first exposure (1-13 years) and years of exposure (8-36 years). The linguistic performance of the groups was compared on three tasks: (a) the Oxford Placement Test as a general proficiency measure, (b) the Vocabulary Levels Test devised by Nation (1990) as a measure of vocabulary size, and (c) the Grammaticality Judgment Test as a measure of morphosyntactic knowledge. The results showed a strong interaction effect between years of exposure and prior study-abroad experience in predicting the level of general proficiency and vocabulary size, but not in morphosyntactic knowledge.

Keywords: study-abroad experience, instructed setting, years of exposure, age at first exposure, general proficiency, vocabulary size, morphosyntax _{^{|Return to index|}}