The acquisition of French partitives by Spanish learners at primary school

Loscos, T. & Escobar, A.

UNED

This paper deals with the acquisition of grammatical structures in the second language in a content-and-language integrated learning programme. More especifically, it researches the acquisition of partitives by 8-year-old pupils who follow a French immersion programme in a public Primary school, only through exposition to this structure in the subjects of science and social studies. The choice of this structure is determined by the fact that it does not exist in their mother tongue, Spanish, although it is frequently used in the target language. The paper also discusses the effects of the learning environment elements, such as the school, the CLIL programme and autonomic policymaking on bilingualism. In order to ascertain whether the students had aquired the structure, we elaborated a Grammatical Judgement Test (GJT), which consists of a multiple-choice question with experimental and placement items in a counterbanced order. Subjects who did not show enough language competence were excluded. The data obtained with the GJT is completed with other qualitative data, mainly the analysis of documents, since subjects were required to correct the ungrammatical sentences. Our results suggest that the acquisition of these grammatical structures is not possible unless we include specific activities to reinforce implicite learning.