Extended stays abroad are seen as important opportunities for acquiring and improving a language. One focus of research on study-abroad experiences is the length of stay, indicating that “the longer, the better” (Llanes, 2011, p. 208), although some research also confirms the effectiveness of shorter stays (Yang, 2016). The Council of the European Union (1997) recommends that all students in all member states should start foreign language education as early as possible. Schools support learning a foreign language through exchange programs to provide authentic learning activities and improve students’ language skills. In a student exchange, students attend a school in, for example, an English- or French-speaking country for a certain period of time. During this time, they usually live with a host family. Apart from exchange programs, students have the opportunity to attend language courses abroad during school breaks that are often organized by private institutions. Students spend a school break, e.g., in an English- or French-speaking country and receive instruction focused on developing competence in the target language. Students taking these courses are usually accommodated in hostels and only rarely in host families. Why can parents, students, and teachers expect gains in language proficiency from a stay abroad? Relevant here is the theory of opportunities which provides a convincing basic explanation of why staying abroad as a student may enhance foreign language learning. Carroll (1963) first introduced the idea of “opportunities to learn,” which has been taken up by utilization-of-learning-opportunities models (e.g., Helmke, 2010). The basic assumption is that the greater the amount of (high-quality) opportunities provided, the higher the learning growth will be. However, what is not considered is that learning is a social and interactional process. This implies that it is not solely the utilization of learning opportunities that matters: Relationships with teachers and peers also significantly influence the learning process.

Although empirical research on the effects of stays abroad on L2 acquisition has increased in both linguistics and educational science in recent decades, most empirical studies focus on university students. In comparison, less is known about the effectiveness of stays abroad for younger students, in particular students at the lower secondary level, the target group of our study. To our knowledge, the only empirical study focused on the language outcomes of high school students through attendance of study-abroad programs using large-scale assessment data is the study by Hübner et al. (2021) that asked students in Year 13 whether they had studied abroad during their school career. Heinzmann et al. (2025) note that “in comparison to productive skills, the effect of student exchange on receptive skills, such as listening and reading is poorly studied” (p. 809). Thus, the possible effects of language stays on the two receptive skills require further attention. Although the research literature mentions various programs and different forms of language stays, the language gains from the two types, student exchanges and language courses abroad, have not been researched within one study. With regard to different target languages, in particular EFL and FFL, again there are no reliable findings from studies that compared students’ proficiency with a similar background in both languages.

In the study to be presented, we focus on Year 9 students enrolled in German high schools (academic school track) and investigate the following research question: Do language stays abroad have a significant beneficial effect on students’ foreign language skills? Under this research question, we investigate the potentially different effects of stays abroad by examining two types of stays abroad (student exchanges and language courses), two different languages (English and French), and two different language domains (reading and listening comprehension).

Our analyses are based on data from the IQB Trends in Student Achievement 2015, a study that assessed language proficiency at the end of Year 9 in German (L1) and in the first foreign language. In this study, a total of 31,532 students from all 16 German federal states took achievement tests of EFL between April and June 2015. In addition, during the same time period, achievement tests of FFL were administered to a separate sample of 3,772 students from six German federal states. These six states were selected due to the availability of a sufficient number of schools offering FFL education. In secondary education, the German school system is characterized by relatively fixed school tracks. In each state, several school types leading to different certificates exist in parallel. The school-type “Gymnasium” represents the academic track for students aiming to obtain the “Abitur,” which in Germany is the university entrance certificate. The data shows that it is mainly within this school type that students engage in language stays abroad. For all other school types, case numbers were too small to allow further statistical analyses. For that reason, we restrict our analyses of the effects of language stays abroad to the subsample of students attending a Gymnasium. Hence, the respective samples comprised 13,073 students for EFL and 3,261 for FFL. For both languages, the achievement tests administered within the IQB Trends Study 2015 assessed foreign language proficiency in the domains of reading comprehension (RC) and listening comprehension (LC). In the student questionnaire, the participants were also asked whether they had ever visited a majority English- or French-speaking country. If that was the case, they were requested by means of a multiple-response item and a constructed-response item to provide further information on the purpose (e.g., student exchange, language courses during summer vacation, school trips, living abroad with parents) and the duration of their visits. Based on the students’ responses to these items, we constructed the independent variables for our analyses. In our analysis of the effects of language stays abroad on students’ foreign language proficiency, we employed propensity score matching (PSM; Rosenbaum & Rubin, 1985) to account for the potential bias associated with self-selection in such learning activities. Through PSM, we were able to control for a large number of possibly important covariates and (carefully) draw causal inferences from estimated differences in foreign language proficiency.

One notable finding is that participation in language courses has no significant effect on students’ receptive language skills. In particular, we can show that students who have spent time abroad do not have higher proficiency scores than students who have not spent time abroad. This finding may come as a surprise given the extensive market for language courses and the promises made by providers. However, it should be noted that a stay abroad – whether in the form of a student exchange, a vacation trip, or attendance at a language course abroad – offers further potential benefits for students, such as the development of intercultural competence. Furthermore, the advantages of SE learners were more evident for LC than for RC. Our study revealed a larger association of student exchanges with LC than with RC. This is not surprising, considering that living with a host family during a student exchange exposes learners to numerous authentic communication situations, which, above all, require language skills in speaking and listening. These learning opportunities should, hence, especially enhance their oral language proficiency. This study has limitations. In particular, the data are from a cross-sectional study. Students were asked about their previous sojourns in a questionnaire, and their receptive language proficiencies were tested on the same day. Strictly speaking, this design does not allow us to draw conclusions about causal effects. However, we addressed this issue methodologically by using propensity score matching and including relevant covariates in a stepwise procedure. This approach allows us to compare statistically parallelized individuals in terms of whether they have experienced a stay abroad or not. To explore the robustness of our findings, we additionally employed an alternative approach to account for selectivity bias using fixed-effects regression models and obtained very similar results.

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