Article published In:
Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education: Online-First Articles

EFL lexical abilities in pre-primary education

Longitudinal effects of individual differences, quality and quantity of exposure

ORCID logo | Universitat Internacional de Catalunya
 | Universitat Internacional de Catalunya
The increasing need for plurilingualism within the latest decades has led many schools to promote an early start to Foreign Language (FL) teaching, in some cases as early as in pre-primary education. Research on pre-primary students to understand FL development in instructed contexts is still scarce. This study examines (1) how English as a FL receptive vocabulary develops over two years in pre-primary education learners, and (2) which internal and external factors influence it. Data were collected from 71 Catalan-Spanish bilingual pre-primary students at three times: T1-September 2019 (M age = 4;6), T2-September 2020 (M age = 5;1), and T3-June 2021 (M age = 5;9). EFL receptive vocabulary was measured with the PPVT-4 (Dunn & Dunn, 2007), and at T1 participants’ parents filled in a background questionnaire. Results showed growth in participants’ lexical abilities from T1-T3. The strongest predictors of lexical development were gender, maternal education level, school, and EFL out-of-school exposure.
Keywords: lexical abilities, English as a Foreign Language, CLIL, out-of-school exposure, individual differences, pre-primary education
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Individual differences (internal vs external factors)
    • 1.2Quantity and quality of exposure
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Study design
    • 2.2Participants and intervention
    • 2.3Data collection
    • 2.4Data analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Overall lexical development
    • 3.2Individual differences
    • 3.3Quality and quantity of exposure
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Overall lexical development
    • 4.2Predictors of lexical development
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
    • Declaration of interest statement
    • Data availability statement
  • Note
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 29 November 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jicb.24029.seg
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