A Preliminary Study : A Short-Term Study Abroad Programme and Learners' Language Development

抄録

After the one-month study abroad programme, the improvements in the learners' spoken performance were observed in the following areas: 1. Time: There is a tendency that the learners now understand and respond to questions more readily. 2. The Amount of Production: The leaners can produce more language in terms of the number of words and T-units. 3. The Amount of Message & Information: The learners can explain situations that they are in and describe picture story in more detail. 4. Discourse: The learners now use more cohesive devices to organize their language production. On the other hand, the gains in the learners' success rates were, though positive, not statistically significant throughout the three parts of the test. Therefore, it seems that after the short-term study abroad programme the learners improved fluency in their spoken performance, but not so much accuracy. This is in line with the general impressions reported by many English teachers about changes in the language abilities of the students who participated in such programmes (e.g., Numoto and Joto, 1990; Geis and Fukushima, 1997). Yashima and Viswat (1994), although dealing with a different type of programme, also reported similar improvements in their eight high school students' spoken performance. Further research is needed to improve the reliability and validity of the present study by involving a larger number of learners and at least two groups of samples, one with the treatment and another without it, and also by extending the research to include different types of study abroad programmes.