Although the effect of the study abroad environment on foreign language learners’ speech act performance had been underexplored for many years, a number of studies have been published in the last decade that help to shed light on the impact of study abroad sojourns on language learners’ pragmatic competence. This paper will review and discuss investigations examining the effect of study abroad on language learners in a variety of study abroad contexts (e.g. Canada, United States of America, Latin America, France, Germany, Great Britain) and involving a variety of native and target language combinations (e.g. Chinese – English, English – French, English – German, English – Spanish, German – English, German – French, Japanese- English). The speech acts investigated are: advice, apologies, leave-taking, offers, refusals, requests and suggestions.