Gure Ikastola en tres languages: the teaching and learning of trilingual oral expository skills by means of a didactic sequence
Abstract
The aim of this presentation is to analyse the development of trilingual oral expository skills in sixteen-year-old Spanish L1, Basque L2 and English L3 students in the framework of a multilingual didactic sequence. The promotion of multilingualism including a minority language such as Basque is a major specificity of the Basque educational system (Cenoz, 2009; Idiazabal et al., 2015), and the Integrated Teaching of Languages (ITL) is highlighted as a relevant approach for multilingual education both in the Basque and European contexts (Gobierno Vasco, 2015; Troncy, 2014).
Initial and final oral expository texts produced at the beginning and at the end of a didactic sequence by trilingual students constitute the empirical data of this study. Both texts were addressed to students’ school community as well as to foreign students with the aim of presenting their school. We followed text genre-based criteria in order to analyse students' trilingual productions (Dolz & Schneuwly, 2016).
Results show that students did improve their oral expository texts overall, although to different extents: among the aspects that showed a greater improvement, we can name the explicit mention of core elements at the introductory section in Basque, the more consistent use of topic introducers regardless of the language and the more regular use in English of resources to clarify those concepts whose meaning could be difficult to grasp for foreign students. Among those aspects where improvement is notably less, we could mention that students hardly ever addressed the audience in English and thus failed to catch their interest; also, the production of target-deviant past tense verb forms in English remains quite problematic.
From the perspective of the ITL, we will conclude that this analysis shows that teaching oral expository skills from an integrated perspective fosters multilingual development, being inter-linguistic discursive transfer a relevant didactic resource (Cummins, 2008).
Keywords
trilingual oral expository skills; trilingual didactic sequence; language alternation and integration; interlingual transfer; multilingual competence
University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) Spain
Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The Copyright Holders of the submitted texts are the Authors. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the TAPSLA websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution - Share Alike (CC BY-SA 4.0). The user is free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
1. License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
2. Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
3. User Rights
Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
4. Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
