The Impact of Cultural Contact on Exchange Students’ Foreign Language Development

Abstract

It is well-known that participating in a cultural exchange program brings about many personal, social, academic, and professional benefits for the exchange student. One of those benefits is improving the student’s foreign language. The current study, therefore, aims to investigate how cultural exchange student programs lead to the improvement of students’ language skills, in particular, and overall language fluency and proficiency, in general. The data was gathered through a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. 16 Moroccan exchange alumni from the YES (Youth Exchange Scholarship) program were recruited using snowball sampling to take part in the study and evaluate how their proficiency in English has progressed thanks to the ten months of cultural exchange they have spent in the host country and the most helpful activities that helped them improve their language skills. Then seven of them were selected to give more insights into this language improvement. The data from the questionnaire and the interviews showed that students relied on different activities to further improve their productive and receptive skills making use of the contact they had with native speakers in the host country. Moreover, the data revealed a significant improvement in the students’ language proficiency and language fluency.