The subjects of the study were six university students who participated
in a programme (ERASMUS), funded by the European Union,
which helps university students to spend an academic year in another
European country. Five of the six were in universities in France, and one
was in Brussels. During this year the students attended the regular courses
at the university and got credit for these. They generally lived in university
residences. There was a system in place in which the students were
assigned a host French family which invited them on occasion to spend
time in their home. This was taken up by the students with varying regularity.
In general, the amount of contact with native speakers in interactive
situations varied with the individual. Although there was no quantitative
data on the effect of native contact on language acquisition, the
study would suggest that amount of contact did indeed result in better
performance in relation to the variable studied. All of these studies
attribute the relative success in the acquisition of the L2 partly to the fact
that the learners are living in the native speech community and partly to
the amount of contact with native speakers.