Assessing FL pronunciation in a semi-immersion setting: The effects of CLIL instruction on Spanish-Catalan learners’ perceived comprehensibility and accentedness

Abstract

This paper reports research in progress on the effect of content-based learning on speech production by Catalan-Spanish learners of English as a foreign language (FL). The data presented here are part of a longitudinal study which explores the short- and mid-term effects of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), a semi-immersion programme that consists in teaching one or two subjects of the school curriculum entirely in a FL. More specifically, we intended to find out whether there was evidence of gains in intelligibility and foreign accent after one year of CLIL instruction. Two groups of learners varying in amount and nature of formal FL instruction and a control group of native English peers were recorded performing a controlled speaking task at two data collection times separated by one-year interval. The speech samples were assessed by four expert native English judges in terms of degree of comprehensibility and foreign accent. As expected, the read speech samples by the CLIL learners were judged to be more intelligible and less accented than the samples by their peers in conventional formal instruction (FI), but both groups differed significantly from the native English group. No significant short-term improvement in either intelligibility or foreign accent was found after one year of CLIL instruction, suggesting that gains in learners’ pronun-ciation in a content-based learning context are more likely to appear in the mid or long run.