Production Accuracy of Verb Morphology in Early EFL: Does Primary School CLIL Make a Difference?

This study explores the impact of CLIL and standard EFL instruction on the use of verb morphology by 40 primary school Catalan/Spanish learners in an oral narrative task over a period of two academic years. The empirical evidence available to date comes from secondary school contexts and indicates that CLIL learners are more accurate using verb inflections than EFL-only learners in the early teens, whereas starting with the mid teens, CLIL has a ceiling effect on the development of verb morphology, with differences only in terms of higher production accuracy of irregular past forms (Huettner and Rider-Bunemann, 2007; Lazaro Ibarrola, 2012; Garcia Mayo and Villarreal Olaizola 2011). No research is available on the impact of CLIL instruction on the use of verb morphology in the early stages of EFL. Production accuracy was analysed in terms of omission, targetlike use and errors regarding suppletive and affixal verb forms. Our findings show that CLIL impacts on the intra-group progress rates for affixal omission, in particular -s omission, and targetlike use of the progressive form. The vehicular use of the target language in CLIL instruction seems to strengthen learners' reliance on semantic prototypes in their use of the progressive form.