While study abroad at the university level has been shown to benefit many aspects of second language proficiency, little is known about how this affects participants’ writing skills. The present study explores writing development in a group of 30 EFL learners over a period of 15-months and compares the progress made in two distinct learning contexts: study abroad (SA) and classroom instruction at home (AH). The learners’ writing before and after each learning context is evaluated by trained raters and analyzed quantitatively, using an assortment of computational tools, to determine whether progress is made in the domains of complexity, accuracy, fluency, lexical diversity and sophistication, and cohesion. The learners’ writing is also compared, in terms of both quality and characteristics, to the writing of 28 native speakers of English who wrote on the same topic under the same conditions. Results indicate the writing improves significantly after the SA context, and that learners make considerably more progress while abroad than during the AH context. / S’ha demostrat que les estades a l’estranger a nivell universitari són beneficioses en molts aspectes per a millorar la competència d’una segona llengua. Tanmateix, no se sap gaire sobre com afecten l’habilitat d’escriure dels participants. Aquest estudi investiga el desenvolupament de l’escriptura en un grup de 30 aprenents d’anglès com a llengua estrangera durant un període de 15 mesos. Alhora compara el progrés en dos contextos d’aprenentatge diferents: les estades a l’estranger i la instrucció a l’aula al país d’origen. S’avalua l’escriptura dels aprenents abans i després de cada context d’aprenentatge, d’una banda, per mitjà d’un grup d’avaluadors experts i, d’una altra, mitjançant un conjunt d’eines computacionals per a determinar si hi ha progrés en els dominis següents: complexitat, correcció, fluïdesa, diversitat i sofisticació lèxiques i cohesió. També es compara, en termes de qualitat i característiques, amb l’escriptura de 28 parlants nadius d’anglès que van escriure textos sobre el mateix tema i en les mateixes condicions. Els resultats indiquen que l’escriptura millora significativament després de l’estada a l’estranger i que els aprenents progressen més quan són a l’estranger que no pas en el context d’instrucció a l’aula al país d’origen

The aim of this Ph. D dissertation is to analyze, through qualitative methodologies, textbooks for learning Chinese as a Foreign Language (ChFL) for Spanish speakers. Special attention has been paid to one of the most complex areas in ChFL: the particle 了/le/, in order to gain deeper insight into some of the aspects of curriculum design and pedagogic planning in the textbooks for teaching ChFL. Our instrument of analysis was developed by drawing from two sources. Firstly, from a solid theoretical foundation which took into account 7 different disciplines of Language Science: 1) the Cognitive Linguistics, 2) the Pedagogic Grammar, 3) theories about second language acquisition (SLA), 4) Second and Foreign Language teaching approaches, 5) studies on the development and analysis of curriculum and study materials 6) Spanish-Chinese Tense and Aspect system studies and comparison, and 7) studies of the particle了, not only from the linguistic and pragmatic-communicative perspective, but also from discursive, sociocultural and cognitive perspectives. Secondly, the opinions of 10 experienced ChFL teachers and students were considered to enable the analysis to incorporate both theoretical and practical perspectives. Finally, a 4 levels analysis instrument with 6 parameters and 24 variables, each of them covering one specific pedagogic or linguistic perspective was designed for analyzing three series of textbooks (three levels each, 9 volumes in total), namely: 1) El Nuevo Libro de Chino Práctico I, II y III, 2) El Chino de Hoy I, II y III y 3) Hanyu-Chino para hispanohablantes I, II y III. The particle 了 has also been used as a filter for selecting our target lessons, as opposed to selecting lessons at random. After analyzing the data with the designed instrument a conclusion has been made, which we hope will contribute to the further development and improvement of ChFL teaching and learning.