Abstract
Research on the impact of immersion programmes on second language acquisition has generally shown benefits in comprehension and fluency, while lexico-grammatical accuracy has been found to lag behind. Nevertheless, empirical evidence on the development of lexico-grammatical competence in CLIL contexts is still scanty. Thus, the current study intends to shed new light on the growth of lexico-grammatical accuracy in lower secondary education CLIL learners. More specifically, it reports on two groups of Catalan-Spanish bilinguals (N = 105) in the Balearic Islands enrolled in year 2 at the start of the study (ages 13–14): (a) CLIL participants learning either science or social science through the medium of English (N = 70); and (b) non-CLIL informants (N = 35). Lexico-grammatical development is analysed on the basis of their performance on a cloze test and a fill-in-the-blanks tense-and-aspect test over a 3-year span. Our results indicate that the CLIL context appears to accelerate lexico-grammatical learning. However, CLIL learners do not surpass their non-CLIL peers when accumulated hours of instruction are equivalent. These findings point to the need for increased attention to form and integration of language and content in CLIL environments.
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Notes
- 1.
Our study being a longitudinal one, only participants that had completed all four data collection times, as described in Sect. 2.3, were eligible for analysis. Thus, participants that dropped out or failed to complete one of the two tests under study at a given data collection time were not considered.
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Spanish Government (HUM2004-05442-C02-01, HUM2007-66053-C02-01/02 and FFI2013-48640-C2-2-P) and the Catalan Government (SGR2005-01086/2009-140/2014-1563).
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Juan-Garau, M., Prieto-Arranz, J.I., Salazar-Noguera, J. (2015). Lexico-Grammatical Development in Secondary Education CLIL Learners. In: Juan-Garau, M., Salazar-Noguera, J. (eds) Content-based Language Learning in Multilingual Educational Environments. Educational Linguistics, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11496-5_11
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