L1 use and morphosyntactic development in the oral production of EFL learners in a CLIL context

This paper explores the effects of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) instruction on the oral production of 15 high-school learners of English. The learners' use of the L1s (Basque and Spanish) in discourse markers and repair sequences as well as the learners' overall morphosyntactic development were analysed at two testing times (age 13 and 15). Quantitative and qualitative analysis show that L1 use significantly decreases along the two-year period but this drop does not correlate with an increase in the learners' ability to either use English discourse markers or paraphrase unknown words. As for morphosyntax, there is a significant development over the two-year period and, perhaps more interestingly, these learners seem to be one step ahead when compared to similar data from non-CLIL students.