Kramsch (1991) points to the question asked by administrators in
the US: “Is a foreign culture learned best in a domestic instructional setting
or by living and studying abroad?” Administrators in Britain funding
year abroad programmes such as ERASMUS and SOCRATES ask similar
questions (Coleman 1995). Kramsch says “there is to date no conclusive
evidence to show that study abroad per se leads to cross-cultural understanding,
or to the development of the cross-cultural personality.” It is
clear we need to investigate further what it is exactly students learn when
they go abroad in relation to sociolinguistic and sociocultural issues as
much as we need to investigate other aspects of acquisition. There appears
to be a general feeling in the year abroad literature that “cultural aspects”
are important (cf. Parker and Rouxville 1995). The qualitative data —
reports, surveys and so on — provide a general picture of what the experience
abroad is like. On the linguistic gains alone, Freed (1995) provides
the best evidence to date. And, whereas there is growth in research in the
sociolinguistic area of SLA in general, there is so far very little empirical
data on the sociolinguistic aspects of acquisition in relation to year abroad
learning specifically. If, as Freed points out, evidence is scarce in relation
to SLA and the study abroad issue in general, it is especially scarce in relation
to sociolinguistic language use.