Does CLIL exposure affect the acquisition of reference in narratives? A corpus-based study of L2-English

Abstract

A great amount of literature in the Spanish educational context investigates the possible benefits of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) instruction. Some studies focus on the benefits of CLIL in general proficiency, while others focus on specific areas of language (Ruiz de Zarobe, 2011). These studies show that CLIL seems to be beneficial for general proficiency (though there is counterevidence), but the benefits are not so evident for specific linguistic areas. The use of referring expressions (REs) is a specific linguistic area well investigated in Second Language Acquisition Research but still not explored in CLIL settings. This study, thus, investigates this phenomenon from the point of view of CLIL instruction and tries to add some insights to the field of SLA. Therefore, the main goal of this study is to investigate the use of REs in discourse and the factors that constraint their use and determine whether their acquisition depends on the exposure to CLIL. In order to do so, we use a corpus-based methodology and analyse written narratives comparing CLIL and non-CLIL learners. Results show that i) the use of REs is constrained by several factors and ii) CLIL instruction may be beneficial for the use of REs at early stages but CLIL and non-CLIL learners end up behaving similarly at intermediate stages and their production is still far from the native norm; that is, longer exposure to the L2 through CLIL instruction does not ultimately pose benefits at the syntax-discourse interface.