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Bilingual education and L3 learning: metalinguistic advantage or not?

Published version
Peer-reviewed

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Type

Article

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Abstract

Metalinguistic skills are highlighted in the literature as providing bilinguals with an advantage in additional language (L3) learning. The extent to which this may apply to bilingual education and content-and-language-integrated-learning settings, however, is as yet little understood. This article reports on a study exploring and comparing the metalinguistic skills of Dutch secondary school pupils enrolled in a Dutch–English bilingual and a regular programme as captured in think-aloud protocols and retrospective interviews related to an individual picture-description task in German. The findings indicate that clear metalinguistic advantages for the pupils in the bilingual stream could not be established. However, the study found evidence of changes in pupils’ L3 processing related to the functioning of the multilingual mental lexicon, a more functional awareness of language, and the pupils’ attitudes towards language learning. These findings were able to shed light on the nature of metalinguistic skills – highlighting the need for a more precise definition in particular – while simultaneously revealing the limitations of the concept for understanding multilingual language processes in bilingual education settings.

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Keywords

Bilingual education, CLIL, L3 learning, metalinguistic skills, language awareness, multilingual proficiency

Journal Title

International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1367-0050
1747-7522

Volume Title

20

Publisher

Taylor & Francis
Sponsorship
The research presented in this work was supported by a scholarship of the Economic and Social Research Council, UK.