Dependent prepositions and phrasal verbs in CLIL and non-CLIL writings: A focus on accuracy

Details

Supervisors

Meunier Fanny

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

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

Abstract

Multilingualism and foreign language learning is highly valued in a context of globalisation. One way to foster this, is the implementation of CLIL education in primary and secondary schools. Traditional instruction has shown flaws in terms of language learning at school. It however still remains uncertain to what extent CLIL education has an impact on Second Language Acquisition. The present study aims to contribute to current research on CLIL by analysing the impact of input (i.e. the amount of exposure to the target language) on the accurate use of dependent prepositions and phrasal verbs. The study examines 180 texts written by French-speaking students in their 5th year of secondary schools who are learning English as their L2, either in a CLIL (n = 90) or a non-CLIL (n = 90) program. The data was collected and pre-analysed by Amélie Bulon, PhD student at the Université Catholique de Louvain. From this pre-analysis, only the relevant information for the study were extracted and analysed, namely the dependent prepositions and phrasal verbs. Findings reveal that the texts written by the CLIL students contain more dependent prepositions and phrasal verbs than the texts written by their non-CLIL peers. Findings also show that they display a better accuracy in the usage of the grammatical collocations. Moreover, as far as range and occurrence are concerned, results show that the students inside both groups are homogenous and regular in their use of the grammatical collocations. In terms of accuracy, however, results show that the students’ ability to use the grammatical collocations correctly, is more unevenly distributed inside both groups.