Concept Mapping for Noun Identification in CLIL Textbooks by Primary Education Students

Abstract

This study aims at observing if initial training on concept mapping improves pupils’ skills on noun category identification from foreign language (L2) texts. To observe the null hypothesis, learners receive short-term training to manage the basics of concept mapping. After the intervention, in a classroom context of reading and writing assignments in the English language, Spanish primary students identify and circle substantives in texts from their CLIL textbooks. The sample comprises sixty fifth-grade Spanish pupils age-ranged 10 to 11. Though the school has an English-Spanish bilingual program, the students are not complete bilinguals. In the sample, participants belong to both male and female genders non randomly assigned. Concerning the identification of singular and collective nouns from texts, including plural irregular nouns, both treated and control sample groups displayed similar results. Although the instructed group was skilled in detecting and categorizing hypernyms and first hyponym categories of nouns, they did not precisely discriminate adjectives, confusing them with nouns. Dissimilarly, the untrained control group not only mistakenly identified adjectives as nouns but also other grammatical categories as verbs, conjunctions, pronouns, and adverbs. The scarce disclosed precision by the non-trained group was also perceptible in the production of the concept maps. When they had to make the concept mapping tasks, control participants tended to make flow charts, mind maps, and tree diagrams instead. Contrarily, the trained group accomplished the activities satisfactorily. Yet the outcome of this study reveals that a little training on concept mapping leads to disclosing slight achievement in discriminating information from L2 texts in students. Hence, statistical analysis reveals that concept mapping helps students differentiate lexical and grammatical categories and to synthesize the information.