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The Challenge Language attitudes and beliefs play an important role in the development of dialectal variation and sociolinguistic competence. How do they explain learners' choices to avoid specific dialectal variants in production? This article employs a language ideological framework to explore why one group of students chose to eschew Castilian Spanish [θ].

This chapter explores how limited gains in the L2 acquisition of sociolinguistic variation relate to particularities of the program and host community where students study abroad. An ethnographic case study finds that learners’ access to input during one program was constrained by a number of interrelated factors, which extended beyond student-related variables to include the programming and policies of their SA school and presence of international tourism in the host community. These findings aid in explaining students’ limited development of local sociolinguistic variants and demonstrate that immersion in SA program cannot be conflated with ample access to sociolinguistic input. Understanding how SA affords the development of sociolinguistic competence requires consideration of programmatic factors in assessing individual differences in language learning outcomes.

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