Correlating linguistic performance with cognitive, educational and socio-affective variables in SLA Dutch and English CLIL in French-Speaking Belgium

Van Goethem, Kristel [UCL] Meunier, Fanny [UCL]

Our contribution aims to present and illustrate the methodological approach that has been adopted in an on-going 5-year multidisciplinary research project on immersion in French-speaking Belgium. Our project starts from the postulate that although recently published surveys have confirmed that immersion learners outperform traditional L2 learners as far as target language test scores are concerned, it nonetheless remains largely unclear how much, in what respect and thanks to which (internal and external) processes/factors immersion students are considered ‘better’ than traditional learners (see Dalton-Puffer 2011). Thanks to the innovative combination of mixed research methods and perspectives, our project tackles some under-investigated facets of immersion, viz. oral proficiency, written skills, lexical, morpho-syntactic and phraseological knowledge, cognitive abilities and influence of socio-affective variables. This interdisciplinary approach will allow us to examine by which cognitive [memory, attention…] and socio-affective [motivational, attitudinal…] factors the potential linguistic [typological, cross-linguistic…] differences between immersion learners of Dutch and of English can be accounted for (see for instance Bialystok and Barac 2012 and Katarzyna 2012). We analyse data from French-speaking immersion and non-immersion learners (control group) of English and Dutch as target languages in the last two years of primary and secondary school education. Regarding the methodological approach, we adopt an innovative combination of corpus-based longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses, together with experimental research designs. A longitudinal learner corpus is currently being collected (two data collection points at this stage), annotated and analysed; two experimental tasks have been conducted; detailed sociolinguistic and attitudinal questionnaires have also been collected, and focus groups studies will soon be performed (set of controlled tasks and individual interviews). During the talk we will focus on the results of the linguistic analysis of the first data collection (carried out in October-November 2015) which comprises 843 texts (emails) written by 438 pupils in the 5th grade of secondary school (enrolled in either an immersion or traditional language learning school setting). We have collected 431 texts in their native language (French), 232 texts in L2 Dutch and 180 texts in L2 English. A first analysis of the global linguistic complexity of these texts indicates that immersion education seems to have a more positive impact on the pupils’ writing skills (in terms of complexity) in Dutch than in English. As for the complexity of the native language (viz. French) it does not seem to be affected by the teaching setting (i.e. immersion or non-immersion). The results of the linguistic analysis will be correlated to the collected cognitive, socio-affective and educational variables. References Dalton Puffer, C. (2011), Content-and-Language Integrated Learning: From Practice to Principles? Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 31, 182–204. Bialystok, E. & Barac, R. (2012). Emerging bilingualism: Dissociating advantages for metalinguistic awareness and executive control. Cognition 122, 67-73. Katarzyna P. (2012). ‘The impact of students’ attitude on CLIL: A study conducted in higher education’. Latin American Journal of Content and Language Integrated Learning 5(2), 28-56.