English language learning in CLIL and EFL classroom settingsa look at two primary education schools

Resumen

This dissertation examines the English language learning experience of primary school learners in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom settings. It focuses, on the one hand, on learners’ oral language production during whole class and pair/group work and, on the other hand, it also explores the amount and type of teacher corrective feedback to address language form in each instructional setting. The data include audio and video recordings of the implementation of a CLIL and an EFL teaching unit in two classes of 5th year primary education students with the same teacher teaching both subjects in two different schools. The main findings show there is not a big gap between the oral production of learners in the CLIL context and the EFL context in the two schools, but there is a subtle tendency for learners in the CLIL context to produce longer strings of language in both schools. In addition, it has been shown that this learner production is predominantly based on the pre-defined model sentences presented by the teacher as language support in the two instructional contexts in both schools. Therefore, there is little room for spontaneous learner-created L2 production in the two instructional contexts. It has also been shown that the presence of the L1 production is greater in the CLIL context than in the EFL context in the two schools but bearing in mind that the role of the L1 is rather different. As for the provision of teacher feedback, the present results also indicate that there is space to focus on form not only in the EFL context but also in the CLIL context in the two schools under investigation. Different types of teacher corrective feedback have been identified throughout the implementation of the CLIL and the EFL teaching units. Recasts have been shown to outnumber prompts in the two learning contexts though the number of prompts is greater in the EFL context than in the CLIL content. Differences across instructional settings have been examined in relation to variables like teaching approach, context familiarity and teacher profile. This investigation sheds some new light on what is actually going on in CLIL and EFL classes with evidence to be used in teacher training schemes to make the most of the two instructional contexts in order to provide a rich English language learning experience.