If the period abroad is properly integrated with the rest of the course, there should be a smooth progression, both linguistically and in terms of the intellectual and academic skills that the student can deploy, from the beginning to the end of the course. That is not always the case in reality. Various research projects have set out to measure the improvement in the linguistic competence of students who have spent a year abroad and the consensus view is that there is a real gain (though it may well arise more from the acquisition of oral fluency bolstered by appropriate para-verbal mechanisms than from an increased knowledge of the structures of the language). Yet students often perceive their linguistic performance to be declining after their return to the home department and there is some evidence to suggest that they in fact make no progress in proficiency.

What seems to happen is that, while abroad, everyday contact with native speakers enables the students to move onto a plateau on which they can operate satisfactorily for their own purposes, mainly conversing orally with fellow students. If they have been taught how to develop and implement their own independent learning strategies, they will make progress on a wider front. Either way, their linguistic confidence will have been boosted and they will have a base from which to develop further. Back at the home department, the language course needs to show them how to climb higher above the plateau, using their greater facility in the foreign language to exploit its stylistic and lexical resources. A diet of prose and unseen will do little to achieve that aim, though there is room for translation as one skill among several.

A functional approach can build on the increased fluency acquired abroad to develop those skills needed for the academic aspects of the course - presenting an argument, narrating, describing. Ways of doing this include:

• requiring students to present an argument, not just in the standard essay format, but perhaps also writing editorial-style material on a particular contemporary issue or by preparing material for an oral debate;
• asking them to analyse, compare and comment on statistical material;
• inviting them to explore, analyse and adopt different registers and styles of a range of written material, which might include journalistic, advertising, legal material alongside literary or academic writing.

A similar approach is needed to ensure that the intercultural learning that has taken place during the period abroad is exploited fully during the remainder of the course. If, as LARA recommends, intercultural learning has been fully integrated with the rest of the course through a proper training in ethnographic methods, the students will be occupied in writing up their ethnographic project after their return to the home department.

Student presentations of their ethnographic projects can also contribute to any modules on language development held in the year after residence abroad. Collections of student ethnographic projects can be housed in learning resources and drawn on by other students in any cultural studies modules.