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Social Network Development, Language Use, And Language Acquisition During Study Abroad: Arabic Language Learners’ Perspectives, Dan P. Dewey, R. Kirk Belnap, Rebecca Ann Hillstrom

Faculty Publications

Language learners and educators have subscribed to the belief that those who go abroad will have many opportunities to use the target language and will naturally become proficient. They also assume that language learners will develop relationships with native speakers allowing them to use the language and become more fluent, an assumption Pellegrino (Pellegrino, 1997, 1998) found to be held by study abroad participants. However, recent research has shown that students do not always use the language to the expected degree and that they often fall back on social relationships with native speakers of their own language (DeKeyser, 2007; Dewey, …