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Article published In:
Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education
Vol. 6:1 (2018) ► pp.85–112
Refereed Article

CLIL at the linguistic interfaces

| University of the Basque Country
| University of the Basque Country

This study explores the effect of CLIL on the acquisition of nominal morphology (syntax-morphology interface) and article use (syntax-semantics-discourse-interface), linguistic areas that have been scarcely investigated in CLIL settings. Here we compare article omission and overuse errors in an oral production task performed by L1 Basque-Spanish learners of L3 English in two CLIL and non-CLIL groups matching in age at testing time and amount of exposure. Results indicate that as regards nominal morphology, CLIL and non-CLIL learners are equal in terms of the omission of the definite and the indefinite article, but CLIL learners learn to solve article overuse more quickly than non-CLIL learners. Taking together these results and the findings from our previous study (Martínez-Adrián & Gutiérrez-Mangado, 2015a), which revealed the non-existence of CLIL benefits with respect to the acquisition of verbal morphology, we conclude that while the syntax-morphology interface seems to be unaffected by CLIL, CLIL can aid in the acquisition of features from the syntax-semantics-discourse interface.

Keywords: content and language integrated learning (CLIL), syntax-morphology interface, syntax-semantics-discourse interface, article omission, article overuse, verbal and nominal morphology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.CLIL and research findings
  • 3.The acquisition of interface properties
  • 4.Research questions
  • 5.Methodology
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Instruments and data collection and analysis
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Oxford proficiency test
    • 6.2Oral narrations
      • 6.2.1Accuracy in the use of definite and indefinite articles
      • 6.2.2Article omission
      • 6.2.3Article overuse
  • 7.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 January 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jicb.17002.gut
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