Abstract
AbstractThis study aims at testing the benefits of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) on oral skills in English by comparing a group of secondary school CLIL learners to two Non-CLIL groups matched for amount of instruction – a two-year-ahead group and a peer group. This sampling design is an attempt to tease the effects of exposure, age and CLIL variables apart, something which has not been addressed in most previous CLIL research. The analyses (holistic evaluation, amount and density of production, and use of compensatory strategies) of participants’ story tellings indicate that CLIL learners’ oral abilities are superior to those of Non-CLIL groups, especially to those of their exposure-matched peer counterparts. Overall, CLIL learners produce denser and richer oral narrations characterized by better content, vocabulary, grammar and fluency, and a marginal use of the first language. These results could be read as indicative of the beneficial effect of CLIL instruction itself on oral production when intervening variables such as amount of exposure and age are managed. In addition, particular attention is given to the lack of positive effect of CLIL on pronunciation.
Highlights
The present study aims at exploring the effects of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) on oral production skills
We present the results of an investigation with secondary English learners where out-of-school exposure is non-existent and CLIL learners are compared to nonCLIL students with a similar amount of exposure
Despite the fact that it must be acknowledged that our foreign language (FL)+2 group had received 14% less exposure than the CLIL group, these tentative results go in line with studies such as Lasagabaster (2008) and the projects conducted by the GRAL research group in Catalonia (Navés and Victori 2010), which have provided evidence that CLIL learners are able to catch up with older Non-CLIL peers with regard to their oral skills
Summary
The present study aims at exploring the effects of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) on oral production skills. Oral production has been acknowledged to be one of the linguistic aspects which may benefit most from methods which foster the use of the language in meaningful contexts (Block 2003) -CLIL being one of these. To date few studies have observed the oral skills in CLIL contexts and some have highlighted the arbitrary results obtained so far regarding the analysis of the speaking skill (Van de Craen, Mondt, Allain and Gao 2007). Divergent results could be ascribed to the fact that there might be intervening variables such as amount of exposure or age which may have not been addressed in CLIL studies (Bruton 2011). The amount and density of learners’ productions as well as their compensatory strategies were analysed
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