Acquisition of reading comprehension in L1 in bilingual programmes of Primary Education. A comparative study

Abstract

In this paper, the effect of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) on the development of reading competence in the mother tongue of 9-year-olds (4^th year of primary school) is analysed. For this purpose, a reading comprehension test was used and the scores obtained by bilingual students (CLIL group, n = 18,541) and their non-bilingual peers (non-CLIL group, n = 1,998) were compared. The overall results indicate that the bilingual programme evaluated in this study, despite use of the mother tongue being limited to around 25 % of the academic curriculum, was not detrimental to the acquisition of reading competence in the L1, possibly due to there being transfer strategies processes between languages. There also were not any differences detected between the two groups in the acquisition of literal and inferential reading levels, although there were significant differences in favour of the CLIL group in the comprehension of lexical items and significant differences favourable to the non-CLIL group in the critical reading level.