non-CLIL Learners Research Articles

The impact of additional CLIL exposure on oral english production

This study aims at testing the effectiveness of additional CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) exposure on the oral production of secondary school learners of English as a Foreign Language. CLIL learners, who had received a 30% increase in exposure by means of using English as a vehicular language, were compared to mainstream English students in a story-telling task. Analyses indicated that CLIL learners’ productions were holistically perceived to exhibit better fluency, lexis and grammar while no differences were found as regards content and pronunciation. Besides, although Non-CLIL learners’ productions were larger in quantity and longer in time, CLIL learners produced denser and more fluent narrations, as attested by their higher number of different words over total number of words, of words over turn, and of utterances over turn. Additionally, CLIL learners resorted to their first language to a lesser extent and demanded fewer vocabulary clarifications. Our findings thus go along with previous research which has revealed advantages of additional CLIL exposure on oral English production.

An Overview of Variables Affecting Lexical Transfer in Writing: A Review Study

The present papers intends to be a review study of lexical transfer. This overview does not claim to be exhaustive, but a review of some of the main variables influencing the process of cross-linguistic influence in lexis. The factors addressed in the present paper are i) L2 proficiency, ii) L1 background, iii) gender, iv) motivation, and v) learning context. In general terms, as learners’ L2 proficiency increases the influence of the L1 decreases. Learners whose L1 is typologically related to the TL tend to resort more frequently to their L1 for lexical transfer purposes, but learners from different linguistic backgrounds seem to undergo the same lexical transfer processes. Studies investigating the interaction between gender and lexical transfer and between more and less motivated learners seem to reveal lack of differences. Finally, there exist quantitative and qualitative differences in L1 lexical transfer of CLIL and non-CLIL learners in their written compositions.

Receptive Vocabulary of CLIL and Non-CLIL Primary and Secondary School Learners

CLIL instruction has been reported to be beneficial for foreign language vocabulary learning since CLIL students show higher vocabulary profiles than students of their same age in traditional EFL contexts. However, to our knowledge, the receptive vocabulary knowledge of CLIL and non-CLIL learners at the end of primary and secondary education has not been examined yet. Hence, this study aims at comparing the receptive vocabulary size 79 CLIL primary learners with the receptive vocabulary knowledge of 331 non-CLIL learners at the end of primary and secondary school. Sex-based differences were also analysed. The 2k Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) was used for the purposes of the study. Results revealed that learners’ receptive vocabulary sizes lie within the most frequent 1000 words, non-CLIL secondary school students throw better results than primary students but the differences between the secondary group and the CLIL group are not statistically significant. As for sex-based differences, we found no significant differences among the groups. These findings led us to believe that the CLIL approach offers a benefit for vocabulary acquisition since CLIL learners have been exposed to the foreign language for a shorter period of time and the results are quite similar to their non-CLIL secondary school partners.