The present article carries out an in-depth analysis of the differences in motivation, input-related variables and linguistic attainment of the students at two content and language integrated learning (CLIL) schools operating within the same institutional and educational context, the Spanish region of Extremadura, and differing only in terms of the social milieu: rural vs. urban. The results show that the CLIL learners in the urban school (n = 27) had started earlier, had had greater formal support outside school (i.e. private English lessons) and had attained a higher level of English (grammar, passive and active vocabulary) than their rural colleagues (n = 21), while their motivation and extramural exposure (i.e. informal contact with English) were not found to be dissimilar. Of the variables considered, social milieu (urban vs. rural), used here as a proxy of socio-economic status, explained most of the variance in language attainment results. ARTICLE HISTORY

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The introduction of English as a foreign language in many countries at ever younger ages poses new challenges for teachers, material designers and researchers in terms of finding out and dealing with the needs of such young children when learning a foreign language. This paper focuses on vocabulary learning at early ages, arguing for the inclusion of figurative language in young learners' English input for two main reasons: firstly, some figurative uses are very frequent in general language and suitable for young learners' communicative needs and, secondly, research (Piquer-Píriz, 2005) has shown that children as young as 5 years old are able to work out figurative extensions of words whose literal meanings they know, through associative (metonymic) and analogical (metaphoric) reasoning. The specific case of hand is explored, drawing on some of the findings mentioned above, to discuss the potential of cognitive linguistic-inspired approaches in the young learner classroom.

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