This is an in-person event. The room will be confirmed closer to the time, and directions to it will be sent out via email to registered attendees.

 

In line with the claims that researchers should work conjointly with school teachers to explore what child learners can actually do with language (Erlam, 2016; García Mayo, 2018; 2019; Lightbown, 2016; Marsden & Kasprowicz, 2017, among others), this talk will describe the aims and the effects of an in-class task-based peer-interaction intervention study on young learners' linguistic and interactional development in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) primary education in Catalonia, Spain.

The intervention was carried out in 4^th grade (9-10 year-olds) and 6^th grade (11-12 year-olds) by implementing task-based peer interaction for 8 weeks with and without explicit linguistic and interactional instruction.

The talk will analyse the effects of the intervention on the learners' use of interactional moves, their FL oral performance (ie accuracy and interactional fluency) and on their explicit and implicit knowledge of specific FL grammatical structures (ie present continuous and past simple tense). The findings will be discussed in relation to the learners' interactional mindsets as well as to EFL teaching in primary education.

Speaker: Dr Elisabet Pladevall-Ballester

Elisabet Pladevall Ballester holds an MA in Linguistics from University College London and a PhD in English Language and Linguistics from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She works as a lecturer and researcher in the Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Germanística in Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Her research interests include child and adult Second Language Acquisition in bilingual immersion and instructed classroom contexts and also in CLIL contexts in primary, secondary and higher education. She is currently leading the research group EFLIC (English as a Foreign Language in Instruction Contexts – SGR693) and teaches English Grammar and Teaching Methodology at the undergraduate level and CLIL in the department’s MA programme.