CLLEAR hosting Dr. Elisabet Pladevall Baluster from the Autonomous University of Barcelona Event

Event details

The ML department and CLLEAR center have the pleasure of hosting Dr. Elisabet Pladevall Ballester from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Elisabet is visiting us during her research leave. She will be offering two seminars 26th and 28th July, one on bilingualism and the other on CLIL. Dr Elisabet Pladevall Ballester Tuesday 26 July at 16.00 in room 65/1095 Title: L1 Use and Focus on Form in a co-taught CLIL programme Abstract: One of the main aims of CLIL programmes is to increase the number of hours of exposure to a foreign language (FL) in the students’ curriculum (Dalton-Puffer, 2011). However, recent studies have explored the role of the L1 in the CLIL class and in students’ FL oral production tasks and findings suggest that CLIL classes are not always carried out in a monolingual FL mode (Gené Gil et al. 2012). More importantly, the coexistence of the L1 and the FL in a CLIL class may be beneficial for students to carry out specific tasks (Martínez Adrián, 2015; Pladevall-Ballester and Vraciu, to appear), to access and consolidate content (Méndez García and Pavón Vázquez, 2012) and to aid their affective learning. It remains to be seen how the use of the L1 in a CLIL class affects the integration of content and language and how or if focus-on-form is implemented. The present study explores the amount and type of L1 and FL (English) use and the presence of focus-on-form in a CLIL program that is taught by both the content teacher and the language specialist at the same time in 6th grade of primary school. Ten 1-hour CLIL science sessions were recorded, transcribed and analysed. Results suggest that L1-L2 use is kept separate in the case of teachers but not in the case of students. That is to say, while students tend to alternate and mix the use of the L1 and the FL when interacting among themselves and with the teachers, the language specialist only uses the FL and the content teacher only uses the L1, mainly to clarify concepts and expand on key content topics. Focus-on-form is hardly present and mainly restricted to the language specialist, but it is both pre-emptive and reactive and lexical and grammatical. A recording of this talk can be viewed in the Useful Downloads section at the bottom of this page. Thursday 28 July at 16.00 in room 65/1097 Title: Developmental asynchrony in the acquisition of subject properties in child L2 English and Spanish Abstract: It is a well-known fact that children acquiring a null-subject language like Italian or Spanish produce null subjects apparently consistent with the target grammar from early on whereas children acquiring a non-null subject language such as English or French exhibit persistent non-target subject drop in root positions past their third year. The present study aims at determining to what extent the pattern of acquisition of Spanish and English subjects observed in L1A can also be seen in child L2A in bilingual immersion settings where English and Spanish are both source and target languages and whether it extends to the subject properties at the syntax-pragmatics interface. Using an elicited oral judgement and correction task, L1 English/L2 Spanish and L1 Spanish/L2 English five-year-olds with the same age of onset, namely three, are compared in their judgements of purely syntactic subject properties and discourse constraints on subject use. Results suggest that there is developmental asynchrony and that markedness effects might explain why L2 Spanish children generally display significantly more target-like judgements than the L2 English group.