Conventional folk wisdom insists study abroad is an inherently valuable educational experience for young people. While traditional study abroad programs were typically a semester or a full year in duration, short-term study abroad programs of only a couple weeks are now the most common type of sojourn abroad. Problematically, evidence is mounting…

This book presents original, empirical data from quantitative and qualitative research studies in the field of language learning aptitude, ability, and individual differences. It does so from the perspectives of Second Language Acquisition, psychology, neuroscience and sociolinguistics. All studies included in the book use a similar and uniform…