The impact of age and exposure on EFL achievement in two learning contexts: formal instruction and formal instruction + content and language integrated learning (CLIL)

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the role of biological age and L2 exposure on the achievement of two groups of Catalan-Spanish intermediate learners of English in secondary school (Group A, Formal Instruction (FI), N = 50; Group B, FI + CLIL, N = 50) regarding receptive and productive L2 skills as well as grammatical knowledge. Learners were matched for hours of exposure (1.330–1.400) in a first comparison, and secondly, for age (13–14 years old). When matched for number of hours of exposure, results confirmed the older learners’ advantage in FL contexts, as non-CLIL students (2 years older) significantly outperformed CLIL learners in listening comprehension and in two measures of writing: accuracy and coordination index. When matched for age, the group with extra L2 exposure (FI + CLIL) was significantly better than the non-CLIL group in reading comprehension and in several dimensions of writing: lexical richness, linguistic and communicative competence. These findings illustrate the language learning potential of a partial CLIL programme in an EFL context. A threshold of 300 CLIL hours may need to be surpassed for CLIL learners to reap the benefits of additional exposure across L2 skills.

KEYWORDS:

• CLIL
• formal instruction
• EFL learners
• age
• exposure

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Dr. Carmen Pérez-Vidal, who implemented CLIL at the school where data where gathered and supervised the larger study (Roquet 2011). Similarly, we would like to acknowledge the insightful comments of Dr. Carmen Muñoz and an anonymous reviewer on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr. Gemma Artieda is Adjunct Lecturer at the English Studies Department of the University of Barcelona (UB), where she teaches at the Master in Applied Linguistics and Language Acquisition in Multilingual Contexts. Her research interests are multilingualism, individual differences, adult foreign language acquisition, language aptitude, and CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning). She has published her research in peer-reviewed international journals such as Learning and Individual Differences and System.

Dr. Helena Roquet is the Director of the Institute for Multilingualism at Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC Barcelona), where she is a Tenure-track Lecturer of Foreign Language Acquisition. Currently she is also Adjunct Lecturer at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). Helena is a research team member of the consolidated research group ALLENCAM (Language Acquisition from Multilingual Catalonia) at UPF. Her main research interests lie within the field of second and third language acquisition, bilingualism, CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) and ICLHE (Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education). Her articles have been published in leading peer-reviewed international journals like International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and Applied Linguistics.

Florentina Nicolás-Conesa is Assistant Professor at the University Center of Defence in the Spanish Air Force Academy in Murcia, Spain. Her research interests include the analysis of writing processes, written products, students’ cognition, and L2 learning and teaching. Her doctoral dissertation on “Development of Mental Models of Writing in a Foreign Language Context: Dynamics of Goals and Beliefs” received the best doctoral thesis award by the Spanish Society of Applied Linguistics. She has published her work in the Journal of Second Language Writing, in the TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching, in the Handbook of Second and Foreign Language Writing and in Spanish journals.

ORCID

Gemma Artieda http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8807-8571

Helena Roquet http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6694-3288

Notes

1 In this paper the terms ‘hours of instruction’, ‘exposure’ and ‘hours of exposure’ are used interchangeably to refer to the instructional hours (FI or CLIL depending on the condition) that students received at school.

2 European Schools (ES) offer studying the L2 from Grade 1, first as a subject, and then in grades 3–5 the L2 becomes the language of instruction during one to three 45-minute periods. A maximum of 30% of the curriculum can be taught through the second language, including FL classes. In secondary education, this percentage can increase up to 60% of the total school time table.

3 Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

4 It should be reminded that accuracy in writing was measured in terms of the number of errors per word. Therefore, the higher the score obtained in the measure of accuracy, the less accurate the writing was.

5 Instructions were provided to students in their L1. We have translated the instructions of all the instruments into English for the reader.