Language-related episodes and learner proficiency during collaborative dialogue in CLIL

Abstract

Research on form focused instruction has provided support for the use of collaborative tasks in which learners focus their attention on formal aspects of language and consciously reflect on their own language use (i.e. produce language-related episodes or LREs). A strand of research on LREs in different educational contexts examines the effect of learner-internal factors, such as target language proficiency, on the amount, type and resolution of LREs. However, little is known about whether learners in content-and-language-integrated-learning (CLIL) programmes pay attention to formal aspects of language and much less about the relationship between learner proficiency and LREs. Therefore, this study investigates how learner proficiency affected the amount, type (lexical or grammatical) and outcome (correct, incorrect or unresolved) of LREs involving the English 3rd person singular marker –s produced during a dictogloss task by 12 pairs of adolescent EFL learners from a CLIL classroom. The findings revealed that there was a positive correlation between the number of LREs involving the target form and the learners’ proficiency. Positive correlations were also found between learner proficiency and correctly resolved grammatical LREs involving 3rd person singular forms.

KEYWORDS:

• Language-related episodes (LREs)
• target language proficiency
• content-and-language-integrated-learning (CLIL)
• the English 3rd person singular marker –s
• dictogloss

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the funding from the research grant awarded by the Basque Government (IT904-16).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr. María Basterrechea is Assistant Professor at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) where she teaches courses on Syllabus Design and English Language. Her research focuses on Focus on form and Interaction in Content-and-Language-Integrated-Learning contexts. She has recently published articles in Language Teaching Research (2019), International Journal of Applied Linguistics (in press) or Tesol Quarterly (2017). She has also published chapters in edited volumes in John Benjamins.

Dr. Michael J. Leeser is Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Florida State University where he teaches courses on Second Language Acquisition, Language Teaching, and Bilingualism. His research focuses on second language input processing and focus on form in second language instruction.

Notes

1. These levels are equivalent to A2, B1, and B2 respectively according to the Common Framework for Languages (Council of Europe, 2001).

2. The text was an adapted version of a piece of news titled ‘The MySpace Age’ retrieved on 1 September 2009 from the BBC News Magazine webpage (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4782118.stm).

3. The transcriptions follow the LINDSEI format (http://www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl-lindsei.html).

(.) (..) (…) pauses: short (<1 sec), medium (1–3 sec), and long (>3 sec)

[ the start of overlapping speech

↘ ↗ ↗ low falling/high rising intonation/mid rising

word:  lenghtening

<XX >  unclear syllables, words, sections

4. Note that helps in paragraph 2 was not considered because verb forms that were different from those in the original text were ignored.

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the funding from the research grant awarded by the Basque Government (IT904-16).