The article is a collaborative effort between researchers from the two universities. The authors present the main strategies implemented in schools to encourage foreign language development. They go on to hypothesise about the success of these strategies, analysing the capacity for language development at an early age in non-immersion contexts.
The article explains that “in Spain, two key strategies stand out among the efforts to strengthen English learning in schools”: the acquisition of foreign languages at an early age, and the implementation of educational approaches such as Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL).
As the authors describe, the ultimate goal of these strategies is to align with the European goal of encouraging multilingualism. They go on to say that "not only is the English language taught through the conventional subject of English, but it is also used to teach non-linguistic content such as science”.
The goal of the research was to study the effect of exposure to English as a foreign language in secondary education, comparing the results with the same analysis for primary school students. Although some advantages were found, three possible future problems arose, which are discussed in the article.
The authors go on to say that “it is not clear that an increase in teaching hours for younger students results in improved linguistic development, given that these students have a lower metalinguistic awareness than secondary school students.” In addition to the difficulty of transferring interlingual knowledge, there were also questions about exposure to the foreign language through the CLIL approach, and the ILE strategy, which involves teaching English as a separate subject.
As Roquet explains, the objective is not only to see if adding CLIL earlier has benefits in English learning, but to see “how increasing English through other subjects—which involves a decrease in Catalan and Spanish—can affect the development of these social languages, taking into account that these are young children who are learning to read and write in their native languages”. Professor Roquet continues that, “we have seen that an increase of a few hours of English through CLIL does not affect Catalan and Spanish development, but neither does it have an impact on English learning”.
In response to the question of whether it is better to start language development in non-immersion contexts as soon as possible, the study explains that it is not clear that the CLIL method has positive effects in school settings at an early age. The authors explain that the results suggest that primary school students, specifically those in their first and second year of learning, may be too young to truly benefit from this approach.
[photo: VCoscaron/Shutterstock]
