Investigating the Phrasicon of CLIL and NON-CLIL Students : a corpus-based comparative analysis using IdiomSearch

Details

Supervisors

Meunier, Fanny

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation générale

Abstract

enThe objective of the present thesis is to contribute to important research on the phraseological skills of CLIL and NON-CLIL learners in French-speaking Belgium. It also aims to test the recent phraseological research tool called IdiomSearch, the fruit of Jean-Pierre Colson’s work at the Université Catholique de Louvain. In the current context of globalization where English’s place as a lingua franca is becoming more and more important, this interest in language learning requires further study of language acquisition in various settings. Since traditional teaching has, at the very least, shown shortcomings in the subject, researchers have turned to CLIL teaching, where the use of the foreign language is integrated into all subjects taught in school. However, linguistic research (particularly on the basis of a learner corpora) is necessary to assess the extent of the linguistic advantages that CLIL teaching provides compared to traditional teaching. Thus it is important to assess phraseological skills, which many linguists believe are essential to learning English as a foreign language. This thesis attempts to evaluate the phraseological skills of these two groups of learners through a corpus study. This study is based on research conducted by Amélie Bulon, a Ph.D. student at UCL. Using the corpus assembled by Bulon as part of her research on CLIL and NON-CLIL learners' phraseological competencies, learners' phraseological competencies are tested and evaluated using a different taxonomy, namely that produced through the IdiomSearch tool. The corpus contains 90 texts written by French-speaking students in 5th year of secondary school (at intermediate/advanced level) from CLIL teaching and 90 texts written by francophone students (intermediate/advanced level) from traditional settings. Phraseological units are extracted via the IdiomSearch application and classified according to criteria based on frequency and fixation. Frequency, variation and accuracy are evaluated and the results are compared to Bulon's results. The phraseological skills of the two groups of learners are then compared. The results confirm Bulon's research. They show that CLIL students have more important phraseological skills, overall. Second, closer attention is paid to the benefits of CLIL teaching in achieving such results and to what phraseology and electronic tools such as IdiomSearch can bring to teaching.