Receptive vocabulary acquisition in pre-primary education through soft-content and language integrated learning
Publication date
2020ISSN
1916-4742
Abstract
Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has become the focus of Foreign Language (FL) research within the last decades. CLIL provides a more complete, naturalistic, and meaningful context to FL learning, which has proven to bring many benefits to learners, such as a higher motivation and promotion of creativity, and better results in receptive skills, vocabulary, morphology and fluency. Nevertheless, most CLIL research has focused on primary and secondary level students and, thus, more research is needed with younger learners, namely, pre-primary students. The present study examines the learning of FL vocabulary in pre-primary learners following a soft-CLIL program, as compared to their same age peers following Formal Instruction (FI) of English. Over the course of six months, pre-primary students of two grades, namely 4- and 5-year-old students (N=155), took part in such program, aiming at teaching two curricular preschool units, traditionally taught in the mother tongue (L1), in English in the FL sessions. A longitudinal study was conducted, and students were administered a general vocabulary level pre-test, as well as a target words receptive vocabulary post-test after the two units had been worked on. The focus of the research was on receptive vocabulary acquisition, but age and word frequency effects were also analyzed. Results showed positive tendencies in receptive vocabulary development through soft-CLIL, although not statistically significant. A significant frequency effect was found, indicating that high-frequency words are recalled more easily than lower-frequency ones, but no significant differences were found when comparing learners from the two grades.
Document Type
Article
Document version
Published version
Language
English
Subject (CDU)
37 - Education
81 - Linguistics and languages
Keywords
Aprenentatge de llengües
Anglès com a llengua estrangera
Educació infantil
Vocabulari receptiu
Adquisició de vocabulari
Aprendizaje de lenguas
Inglés como lengua extranjera
Educación infantil
Vocabulario receptivo
Adquisición de vocabulario
Language learning
English as a foreign language
Childhood education
Receptive vocabulary
Vocabulary acquisition
Pages
22
Publisher
The Canadian Center of Science and Education
Collection
14; 10
Is part of
English Language Teaching
Citation
Segura, Marta; Roquet, Helena; Barón, Júlia [et al.]. Receptive vocabulary acquisition in pre-primary education through soft-content and language integrated learning. English Language Teaching, 2021, 14(10), p. 1-22. Disponible en: <https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/elt/article/view/0/45907<. Fecha de acceso: 1 abr. 2022. DOI: 10.5539/elt.v14n10p1
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Educació [109]
Rights
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/