Lexico-Grammatical Development in Secondary Education CLIL Learners

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.