© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
Young learners' functional use of the L2 in a low-immersion EFL context
Ana Llinares García (PhD) is a Lecturer at the English Department of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She has published mainly in the areas of second language acquisition and interlanguage pragmatics. Most of her present research focuses on the analysis of oral production in classroom contexts. She co-coordinates a national project based on the compilation and analysis of a longitudinal corpus of EFL production. She also participates in a European project based on bilingualism and content/language integrated learning
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Abstract |
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The present study focuses on young EFL learners' use of the L2 to convey various linguistic functions (ask for information, talk about personal things, etc.). Based on the functional categories identified by Halliday (1975) and Painter (1999) in the development of the L1, and after having observed the use of these functions in a full-immersion EFL context, the aim of the study is to analyse the ways in which teachers can promote the use of the L2 to express different functions in low-immersion contexts. The results of the experiment presented here show that, with the use of specific and well-planned activities, teachers can encourage very young learners to use the L2 to convey different functions and to initiate interactions as they usually do in their L1.