Bilingual education and L3 learning: metalinguistic advantage or not?
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Publication Date
2017-11-10Journal Title
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
ISSN
1367-0050
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Volume
20
Issue
7
Pages
788-806
Language
English
Type
Article
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Rutgers, D., & Evans, M. (2017). Bilingual education and L3 learning: metalinguistic advantage or not?. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 20 (7), 788-806. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2015.1103698
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.
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2015.1103698
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/252891
Rights
Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales
Licence URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/uk/
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