Resumen de The effect of CLIL on L3 students’ oral production and comprehension in a primary school context
During the last decades, CLIL programmes have been adopted as the main educational approach in multilingual settings, as is the case of the Valencian Community (Spain). In fact, considerable research has been conducted so as to measure the effectiveness of this approach, comparing the outcomes of CLIL with more traditional non-CLIL contexts such as EFL. However, very little is known about the effects of CLIL on the oral production and comprehension of young language learners whose L3 is English in the Valencian educational system. Against that background, the purpose of this descriptive study is twofold: first, to compare and analyse L3 primary students’ oral production and comprehension in CLIL science and EFL settings; and second, to determine the effect of CLIL on L3 students’ oral production and comprehension. Results have demonstrated that CLIL programmes in primary education benefit students’ oral production as they develop the learning and practice of technical language and specific vocabulary related to the subject matter, the use of complex grammatical structures, and the students’ oral fluency, confidence, and pronunciation when communicating orally. In contrast, we found that non-CLIL learners obtained better results in grammar use, everyday language, accuracy, and oral comprehension. Hence, it can be stated that both educational approaches complement each other and benefit the learners’ language development in different and contrastive ways. Finally, the adoption of a multilingual approach and the implementation of translanguaging practices are proposed so as to promote multilingualism in education.
