Study-abroad in an L3 environment : A study of the development or oral proficiency in speech rate and pronunciation of dental fricatives

Abstract: The aim of this study was to find out whether students participating in a study-abroad program for one and two terms improve their oral proficiency in speech rate and pronunciation of voiced and unvoiced dental fricatives. The participants consist of French, German and Spanish speaking students housed in an L3 environment and interacting with primarily L2 and bilingual speakers. This study was conducted by transcribing and analysing several pre-recorded interviews.                       The results did not show any noteworthy progress in either speech rate or pronunciation, other than for the students who had the weakest oral proficiency at arrival. Nevertheless, all of the results are interesting because they indicate that oral proficiency must have many other influencing aspects. Hence, this survey suggests some reasons that partly may explain the results such as the level of previous knowledge, motivation, impact of lingua franca communities and different personality traits i.e. extroversion and introversion. Thus, the insight into how different features can affect acquiring an L2 may lead to improvements of today’s language learning environments.