This study explores how teachers and students manage plurilingual resources while learning Catalan during study abroad. It suggests that a Catalan language course which incorporates Spanish in its teaching methodology in a planned and organised way would be doubly beneficial, because it would speed up the acquisition of Catalan and stimulate the social practice of multilingualism as the students would learn how to move between Catalan and Spanish in Catalonia and understand the discourses they will encounter during their stay.