The number of students embarking on a study abroad experience continues to grow steadily. A new setting for study abroad in English has developed recently where students may be studying in an environment where English is used as a lingua franca but is not an official language of the country. This setting is referred to as English as a lingua franca study abroad or ELFSA (Köylü 2016). The present study explores the outcomes that may arise from participating in an ELFSA programme and it compares the merits of this type of context to those arising from traditional, anglophone settings. Using a written task and a proficiency test, the L2 gains of 48 Catalan/Spanish undergraduates, learners of English as an L2, were investigated before and after their international stay in either an anglophone country (n = 29) or a non-Anglophone (n = 19) one. Results show that students improved on the four measures investigated and no differences were found between the groups in terms of their L2 gains.