The difference in levels of Language Awareness between EFL VWO students and CLIL VWO students and its effect on noticing FF: A task of noticing false friends between English and Dutch

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2018-07-09
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en
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Various research has shown the importance of language awareness (LA) in second language education. For my research I wanted look into the levels of language awareness in second year secondary school students from the bilingual and regular VWO track, and how these levels relate to the specific task of noticing false-friends pairs between English and Dutch. Research has shown that students who receive bilingual education are more advanced in various aspects of language learning than students who do not receive bilingual education. One of these aspects is vocabulary. It is therefore to be expected that students from the bilingual track score better in a vocabulary task, in this case noticing false-friends. Moreover, students who receive bilingual education are generally more exposed to English than students from the regular track, and bilingual education generally focusses more on the importance of learning English than regular education does. It is therefore to be expected that students from the bilingual track have a higher language awareness than students from the regular track. If these expectations are deemed valid by my research, it can also be expected that there is a correlational between levels of language awareness and the ability to notice false-friends. To support these expectations various components have been incorporated in my research: a LexTALE, a language background and awareness survey, and a false-friends task. The results from these components provided evidence that there is not significant difference in levels of language awareness between students from the bilingual track and students from the regular track, but that there was a significant difference in scores on the false-friends task. Furthermore, the results showed a significant correlation between levels of language awareness and scores on the false-friends task. From these results it could be argued that although there is no significant difference between the two groups regarding their levels of language awareness, raising language awareness in students from the regular track as well as students from the bilingual track is beneficial for increasing their lexical knowledge, while decreasing their chances of wrong lexical interpretations in for example reading comprehension.
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