To address our objectives, we carried out a 1.5-year longitudinal study. A total of 190 participants who were starting Grade 1 in Fall 2021 provided measures of oral language and literacy skills in Catalan, Spanish, and English. Specifically, we assessed participants’ receptive vocabulary and grammar, and their narrative and reading comprehension abilities at three time points: at the beginning of Grade 1, the end of Grade 1, and the end of Grade 2. In addition, parents and teachers were interviewed twice in order to obtain information on participants’ language environment in and outside of school. The participants came from 14 schools, some of which implemented CLIL in addition to EFL. These schools differed in the intensity of English instruction, some accounting for just under 10% of the total instruction time (3 hours per week) to up to 50% (around 13 hours per week).
Participants showed significant improvements in all the abilities for the three languages over the 1.5-year period. Three main findings relevant to language policy emerged from this study. First, increased English exposure at school, whether through EFL or CLIL classes, was associated with larger gains in English vocabulary over the 1.5-year span. That is, participants who had accumulated more hours of English classes between the beginning of Grade 1 and the end of Grade 2 could understand significantly more words in English than those with fewer hours of exposure. However, once other confounding variables were accounted for, participants with more English exposure at school overall did not have an advantage with regard to the development of grammar, narratives, or reading comprehension. Second, we did not find evidence that following a CLIL approach provided an extra advantage in English acquisition development separate from EFL. That is, whether students followed CLIL or not was not related to the growth of English skills over the 1.5-year period. Finally, we found no evidence that the development of Spanish and Catalan was affected negatively by the increase in English exposure at school.
As schools and parents frequently express concerns regarding the age of first exposure to the English language and whether the common belief that "the younger, the better" holds for learning foreign languages, we specifically investigated this question. Our findings indicate that children exposed to English earlier in life had a general advantage at the onset of Grade 1 over those who started learning English later. Specifically, children with earlier exposure to English had better English vocabulary and grammatical skills at the initial assessment. However, this difference was significantly smaller at the end of Grade 2, showing that the initial advantages of early exposure gradually diminish over time. This suggests a negligible effect of early English exposure in the long run for children who acquire English as a foreign language in Catalonia.
So far, the results from this study have been presented at several international conferences on education and linguistics and published in journals of applied linguistics. Other manuscripts are currently being considered for publication in educational journals. In addition, we have created a report aimed at Catalan policymakers. We are currently working on the most effective way of communicating the project results to school boards and families - our primary stakeholders.
