Lexical development in very young EFL learners: A longitudinal study on early multilingualism

Abstract

[eng] Multilingualism is one of the many effects of globalisation. The need to be proficient in several languages has sprung from people’s need to expand their universe outside their countries of origin in search for a better life or a more successful career. As a result, more and more children are exposed to languages either from birth or later on, when they start attending kindergarten, and it is now quite common for a child to be acquainted with two or more languages from an early age (Muñoz & Singleton, 2019). English is one of the most highly valued languages across the globe and has the second highest number of speakers in the world. In countries such as Spain, parents encourage their children to learn this language and therefore send them to either private afterschool academies or, to a lesser extent, English immersion schools. In Catalonia, where Spanish and Catalan are spoken, English is learned as a Foreign Language (FL), and nowadays an early introduction to this language is common. This thesis deals with young Spanish-Catalan bilinguals who learn English in an immersion school. Because lexis is a crucial aspect of language acquisition, especially at very young ages, we measure the lexical development of a group of 51 children in all three languages over three years. Their performance was analysed longitudinally from ages 3 to 5. Their receptive and productive vocabularies in the three languages are compared to a control group consisting of children of the same ages but attending a regular school and following a regular school curriculum. The children’s performance at the end of the immersion school is also compared to that of a group of students in seventh grade (1ESO), at the beginning of secondary school in the regular curriculum. To assess lexical development in English, we used the MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MBCDI; Fenson et al., 1983/2007). The Spanish version of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT; Dunn et al., 2010), together with its Catalan version, were used to assess Spanish and Catalan vocabularies, respectively. At the end of kindergarten (age 5), students also performed an oral storytelling task. Findings show that the immersion group made steady progress in terms of their receptive and productive vocabularies in English, which were significantly larger than those of the participants in the control group. With regard to Spanish and Catalan, results also showed significant gains over time. When comparing the immersion group to the control group in Spanish and Catalan, results indicate that both groups performed similarly in Spanish, but not in Catalan (in this latter language, participants in the control group scored significantly higher than those in the immersion group). Regarding the productive vocabulary assessed in the storytelling task, results were mixed: some measures show a trend favouring the immersion group, others are in favour of the regular school group and yet others are not significant.

Therefore, the amount of exposure provided in immersion settings seems to quickly boost vocabulary learning in young children, whose performance is, in some aspects, still better than that of students in the regular group at the beginning of secondary school. While lexical competence in Spanish does not seem to be affected by intensive exposure to English (no significant differences were found between groups), the results for Catalan indicate that children in the immersion school lag behind their same-aged peers in the control group. Further analyses taking language dominance into account indicated that there were no significant differences in Spanish and Catalan PPVT scores between regular and immersion groups in Spanish-dominant participants. However, significant differences in favour of the regular curriculum group were found for Catalan-dominant children. It remains to be seen whether this is a temporary effect and whether it disappears in the short run as exposure to the L1/L2 accumulates. Results are discussed in the light of previous research and pedagogical implications are considered in relation to young learners’ early introduction to FL.

[spa] El multilingüismo es uno de los muchos efectos de la globalización y cada vez más niños están expuestos a varias lenguas desde edades muy tempranas. El inglés es uno de los idiomas más valorados en todo el mundo y, en España, los padres animan a sus hijos a aprender este idioma, ya sea en clases extraescolares en academias privadas o en escuelas de inmersión en inglés.

Esta tesis trata sobre niños bilingües castellano/catalán que aprenden inglés en una escuela de inmersión. Sus vocabularios receptivos y productivos en los tres idiomas se siguen durante tres años (de los 3 a los 5 años de edad) y se comparan con los de un grupo de control formado por niños de las mismas edades de una escuela pública, donde la exposición a la tercera lengua es menor. También se comparan los vocabularios productivos a los 5 años de los participantes de la escuela de inmersión con la de otros aprendices en una escuela pública al iniciar la secundaria.

Los resultados muestran vocabularios receptivos y productivos en inglés significativamente mejores en el grupo de inmersión que en grupo control. En cuanto a castellano y catalán, los resultados también muestran mejoras significativas a lo largo del tiempo. Al comparar el grupo de inmersión con el grupo control, los resultados indican que ambos grupos obtuvieron resultados similares en castellano, pero no en catalán (en esta última lengua, los participantes del grupo de control obtuvieron puntuaciones significativamente más altas que los del grupo de inmersión). También se analizaron los datos teniendo en cuenta la dominancia lingüística de los participantes. La tesis discute los resultados a la luz de investigaciones previas sobre el tema y las implicaciones pedagógicas de la introducción temprana del inglés como idioma extranjero.