Given the notable increase in participation in short-term (e.g., eight weeks or less) study abroad, especially in the US,
recent empirical work on the role of context in second language (L2) learning has sought to investigate the impact of a short-term stay
abroad on language development. The present study examined English-speaking learners’ syntactic complexity development in oral narratives
after a four-week stay abroad. With regard to three measures of syntactic complexity (length of analysis of speech [AS]-units, number of
clauses per AS-unit, length of clause), findings revealed that the study abroad group demonstrated no statistically significant change over
the study period. However, individual-level analyses revealed that over half of the study abroad learners increased complexity in narratives
in terms of clause length. Further, half of the study abroad learners exhibited increases in syntactic complexity on at least two of the
three syntactic complexity measures examined.
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Bernstein, J., Cheng, J., & Suzuki, M. (2010). Fluency and structural complexity as predictors of L2 oral proficiency. Presented at the
11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association
, Makhuhari, Chiba, Japan, 26–30 September, 2010.
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Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
García-Amaya, Lorenzo
2024. Investigating the relation between L2 pauses, syntactic complexity, and pause location: Longitudinal data from L2-Spanish study-abroad learners. Second Language Research 40:2 ► pp. 399 ff.
García‐Amaya, Lorenzo
2022. Exploring the connection between language use and oral performance during study abroad: Results from the Daily Language Questionnaire 2. Foreign Language Annals 55:1 ► pp. 198 ff.
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