Game on! Young learners’ incidental language learning of English prior to instruction

Vanessa De Wilde,June Eyckmans

doi:10.14746/ssllt.2017.7.4.6

Abstract

In this paper the incidental language acquisition of 11-year-old Flemish children (n = 30) who have not received any formal English instruction is investigated. The study looks into children’s English proficiency and the learner characteristics that can be associated with it. In order to measure the children’s English proficiency, a receptive vocabulary test and a proficiency test (which measured listening skills, speaking skills, reading skills and writing skills) were used. Information about learner characteristics was gathered through two questionnaires (for children and parents). The results show that a significant proportion of the 11-year-olds can already perform tasks at the A2 level (The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) without having had any formal instruction. The study confirms that children learn English from the input they receive through different media (especially gaming and computer use). Furthermore, the data reveal a strikingly positive attitude towards English and demonstrate that in some situations Flemish children prefer using English over their L1 with their peers.

Highlights

The ubiquity of English in the daily lives of non-English native speakers around the world is a well-established fact
The reading and writing test only reached a mean of 46% and the speaking test 49%. This discrepancy in test scores seems to indicate that the receptive skills of these children, who had not received any formal instruction in English before they were tested in this study, were better developed than their productive skills
When we look at the grade statistics for the Flyers test (Cambridge English Language Assessment, 2017), 26.2% of the children have a score of five shields for the listening test and 33.7% of the children get four shields

Summary

Introduction

The ubiquity of English in the daily lives of non-English native speakers around the world is a well-established fact. English seems to have passed the stage of being considered a foreign language, and instead has become part of the working and social life of many EU citizens. As a result of this abundant input, children are exposed to—and may interact with—different types of semantic and syntactic information that can be processed and acquired. This type of incidental language acquisition is defined as a “by-product, not the target, of the main cognitive activity” This type of incidental language acquisition is defined as a “by-product, not the target, of the main cognitive activity” (Huckin & Coady, 1999, p. 182) and has received a lot of attention in the SLA research of the past two decades (Hulstijn, 2012)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion