At present, education is going through a process of internationalisation as the knowledge of a second language has become one of the main objectives of our society as well as an essential requirement for the development of an individual as a whole (INEE, 2012). Hence, European countries, distinguished by its multilingual and multicultural character, have addressed the foreign language issue in positive terms as a way to achieve greater social, political and cultural cohesion (Butler, 2009).

With this concern for teaching and learning a foreign language, the European Survey on Language Competences (ESLC) of 2012 was created, in order to provide a linguistic competence indicator of progress for improving foreign language learning across European schools. Its results led to concerns in countries like Spain, where the results were far away from those initially expected (Morales, 2009). Actually, Spain’s results seemed to indicate that despite the strong presence of English in the school curriculum, the creation and promotion of bilingual schools and the presence of English teaching assistants at school, among others, the efforts have not been sufficient (European Commission, 2006; Bonnet, 2003).

Thus, the results of the ESLC acted as a springboard for our research as one of the main findings in that project was based on the exposure to languages outside school and informal language learning opportunities. The report highlighted that “the use of the target language at home, the number of first languages and the exposure to the target language in the living environment is low” (European Commission 2012, p. 67).

This paper aims at investigating how contextual factors affect the way Europeans learn English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in two European countries (Spain and Greece), as the ESLC 2012 reflected the low results of Spanish students compared to the Greek ones. Those external factors surrounding the learner outside the formal classroom context also have a decisive impact on the acquisition of English. The family environment, the way parents transmit to their children attitudes, values and knowledge, the way children interact with others, etc., play a crucial role on the students’ learning and so on their academic success (Bernstein, 1971, 1989; Bourdieu, 1992). Actually, subsequent studies on everyday literacies showed an evident interest in how this out-of-school learning occurs (Baynham, 2004; Sealey and Carter, 2004).

Bearing in mind the importance of the way learning occurs in the different out-of-school contexts, our paper focuses on the ‘learning ecology perspective’ and the ‘ecological metaphor’. Both of them stress how learning takes place across different informal contexts (e.g. home, school, community, etc.) as every setting can provide opportunities for learning (Barron, 2006). Similarly, Barton (2007) pointed out at the importance of an ecological approach as it aims to understand how literacy is embedded in different human activities, in social life, in language, in learning, etc. Thus, learning in general and, by extension, learning a foreign language, is socially and culturally constructed as it implies that learners are social agents who cooperate with others and use the resources available to them in their environment (Kalaja et al. 2011; Pinker, 1994).

Hence, our research question is: To what extent do monolingual/bilingual contexts with monolingual/bilingual schools have an impact on the way some secondary students learn EFL in two European countries? More specifically, this paper focuses on the following goals: 1) To describe the main features of the learners’ out-of-school context on the learning of EFL; 2) To establish possible relationships between the out-of-school contexts of the students, their parents and their older siblings on the learning of EFL; 3) To identify similar patterns that define the students’ non-formal contexts of learning EFL.

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