Linguistic Development in Spanish

This chapter focuses on the 27 Language and Social Networks Abroad Project (LANGSNAP) participants majoring in L2 Spanish, who spent their period of residence abroad in Spain or Mexico. Linguistic development is conceptualized in terms of general proficiency, fluency, accuracy, syntactic complexity, and lexical diversity. The development of oral fluency is one of the most consistent findings favouring study abroad when compared with at home instruction contexts. As evidenced by the increase in the mean scores and decrease in the standard deviation, there was continued improvement over time on oral proficiency. The chapter summarizes what is known from Spanish L2 study abroad (SA) research, and then describes in detail the participants&s; longitudinal linguistic development in Spanish. It provides a comparison between profiles of development in the languages, highlighting their general similarity and considering reasons for this, but also discussing specific linguistic differences.