Russian second language acquisition during study abroad: Gender differences in student behavior

This study distinguished behaviors that affected gain in speaking and listening comprehension for male and female participants during study abroad in Russia. Such results dispel the common misconception among students that mere participation in a study-abroad program leads to fluency in the language they were studying while abroad (Freed, 1995). Instead, this study provided empirical evidence showing that the process of language gain is much more sophisticated, such that men and women must participate in certain behaviors that are favorable and avoid others that are unfavorable to language acquisition in order to achieve gains in speaking and listening comprehension skills during study abroad in Russia. This study assumed that behaviors that correlate with gain may differ for male and female participants, and, therefore, the analysis was performed while controlling for gender by dividing participants into the two gender groups and performing the analysis separately for each group.; This study has a range of potential implications for the field of second language acquisition and Russian second language acquisition in particular. First, the results of this study offer to the field the first statistically significant data that reveal which behaviors correlate with pre-program proficiency levels and the acquisition of Russian language during study abroad in Russia. These findings provide an opportunity to shape policy on study-abroad programming based on empirical evidence linking behaviors to gain in Russian language skills during study abroad; it also provides evidence of the pre-program proficiency levels that assure that more time is spent in those behaviors. Second, this study contributes to the methodology of the field for examining behavior in the study-abroad environment, which remains largely unexplored despite the fact that so many American undergraduate students participate in junior year abroad programs or that many language programs in the United States rely on such programs to push students' language proficiency to the advanced level. And finally, this study concludes with recommendations for future research that builds on the results found in this study and increases our understanding of the process of second language acquisition in the study-abroad environment.