Beginning L2 complexity development in CLIL and non-CLIL secondary education

Abstract

The present study analyses the impact of a bilingual Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programme vis-à-vis a regular monolingual programme on the development of different aspects of L2 learners’ linguistic (syntactic, morphological and lexical) complexity. Five pupils enrolled in a Dutch–English CLIL programme in a secondary school in the Netherlands are compared with five peers following the mainstream programme with English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching. The longitudinal development of these ten pupils’ linguistic complexity in L2-English is investigated by means of six complexity measures calculated for each of eleven writing tasks collected over a period spanning their first nineteen months of secondary education. Linear mixed models are used to estimate the effects of time and programme type on the pupils’ L2 complexity. The results indicate that both groups of learners significantly increase the complexity of their L2 writing over the course of the study. Surprisingly, only limited effects of programme type (CLIL vs non-CLIL) are found, despite considerable differences in the quantity and quality of instructional exposure to the target language, suggesting that for these pupils increased and more varied instructional exposure to the L2 in the CLIL programme did not lead to significantly different L2 productions in terms of linguistic complexity. Several possible explanations for these findings are considered and the implications for CLIL research are discussed.

Evaluating evidence for the reliability and validity of lexical diversity indices in L2 oral task responses

“…Following previous L2 writing studies and small-scale L2 spoken studies, we found that number of types, TTR, and Root TTR are strongly and intrinsically related to text length in oral proficiency interview settings. Although these results are not surprising given previous research, it bears repeating that Root TTR conflates lexical diversity and text length given the fact that it continues to be used as an index of lexical diversity in SLA research (Bulté & Housen, 2019;Lambelet, 2021). This study also found that D is moderately and intrinsically related to text length (r = .505) in oral proficiency contexts.…”

“…An early attempt to mitigate this relationship was to transform the TTR value by using the square root of the number of tokens in the denominator (Guiraud, 1960). Although this index, commonly referred to as Root TTR or Guiraud’s index, gained a reputation as an appropriate substitute for TTR and is still used fairly widely (Bulté & Housen, 2019; Lambelet, 2021), studies have repeatedly shown that it strongly overcorrects TTR’s negative relationship with text length (e.g., Koizumi & In’nami, 2012; McCarthy & Jarvis, 2010; Zenker & Kyle, 2021). One possible reason for the durability of Root TTR in the field is that it tends to demonstrate a relatively strong relationship with proficiency, and it is certainly an improvement over TTR because it is positively correlated with text length and therefore does not penalize longer essays (see Bulté & Roothooft, 2020; Treffers-Daller et al, 2018).…”

Fluency and its relationship with typology, exposure and lexical retrieval in bilingual Persian-Swedish children’s writing

“…The fact that students grew up speaking Spanish in their homes but had only been taught writing through the medium of instruction, English, was brought to the fore as an explanation of the higher fluency in English (Mikulski & Elola, 2011). Somewhat contradictory results are presented in Bulté and Housen (2019), who found only limited effects of English (L2) as a medium of instruction in a high exposure CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) program on 11-13 years-old children's L2 written complexity. Thus, even though exposure to the L2 target language has an effect on children and adults' L2 proficiency, evidence seems more consistent regarding aspects of reading, listening and vocabulary, than speaking and indeed, writing.…”