English vowel and consonant discrimination skills in primary school CLIL and EFL
Submitted: 2025-09-19
|Accepted: 2026-05-28
|Published: 2026-07-24
Copyright (c) 2026 Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Keywords:
L2 discrimination skills, CLIL, young learners, L2 pronunciation
Supporting agencies:
This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, Government of Spain, under Grant PID2020- 115327RB-I00-MICIU/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 and the Basque Government under grant IT1426-22. The authors would like to express their gratitude to the students and teachers from the primary schools in Cantabria that participated in this project
Abstract:
The contribution of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) to L2 phonological development has scarcely been explored. The present study tested the ability of two groups of Spanish primary learners of English in two differentiated pedagogical approaches to discriminate British English vowel and consonant phonemes. 320 schoolchildren aged 8-10 in an EFL (n=149) learning context and in a CLIL context (n=171) took part in a computer-aided AXB discrimination task which tested British English vowels and consonant phonemes in CVC words. We found no statistically significant differences between CLIL and EFL learners as regards their English vowel and consonant discrimination skills. These findings suggest that increased exposure to English through CLIL may not necessarily lead to enhanced phoneme discrimination at this stage of development. Further research is needed to explore whether long-term CLIL exposure yields cumulative benefits for phonological perception.
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