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Abstract
Abstract This is the first longitudinal study to explore the best time and timing for regular versus bilingual language exposure in (pre)primary programs, using multiple measures over time so as to focus on fluctuations, trends and interactions in individual data as well as intra-individual variation over time. We studied children who had received 50/50 bilingual instruction in German and English (so-called ‘partial CLIL’ programs) as well as children in ‘minimal CLIL’ programs with almost uniquely monolingual German instruction (90% German, 10% English). Results show that, like other individual differences (ID) variables, the age factor behaves like a dynamic entity that changes over time and affects L2 literacy development differentially at different times. Furthermore, while an early age of first bilingual language exposure has no effect on the L2 development for the children in the minimal CLIL program, early-AO bilinguals in the partial CLIL program (age of first exposure 5) outperform the older-AO bilingual group (age of first exposure 7 and 9) in terms of accuracy and (syntactic and morphological) complexity but not in terms of lexical richness and fluency.
Highlights
The prevailing approach to SLA up to the beginning of this century was to focus on product-based explanations of SLA (Lowie and Verspoor 2015), which is reflected, among other things, in the assumption that the variation in interlanguage is either rather systematic or completely random and can be relegated to “(white) noise”
In the cross-sectional part, 251 students who varied in their age of first CLIL instruction onset (5, 7, 9, or 11) were recruited at the end of primary education. 146 of them were in partial CLIL (PAC) classes, while 105 of them came from six minimal CLIL (MIC) classes in Switzerland, where students started learning English at different ages: 54 of them were early starters (AO 7 earlyMIC), while 51 were late starters (AO 11; lateMIC)
Depending on the intensity of the CLIL program, an earlier age of onset (AO) might lead to better outcomes, i.e., PACs did not show comparable effect structure as children in regular foreign language (FL) programs across the board
Summary
The prevailing approach to SLA up to the beginning of this century was to focus on product-based explanations of SLA (Lowie and Verspoor 2015), which is reflected, among other things, in the assumption that the variation in interlanguage is either rather systematic or completely random and can be relegated to “(white) noise”. It was non-systematic, free intra-individual variation that had often been too readily dismissed as noise or measurement error or attributed to “outliers”. For 91 of them data collection occurred four times annually over eight school years (ages 5–12), via narrative and argumentative essays
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