The effects of orthograpy on the pronunciation of English “j” and “g” by CLIL and EFL Spanish schoolchildren

This study intended to provide empirical evidence on the occurrence of orthographic effects (OEs) on Spanish schoolchildren’s English speech production, with a special focus on the potential mitigating effects of extended exposure in the form of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) as compared to traditional English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instruction. Participants completed a word–reading–aloud task which included six words containing the graphemes “j” and “g” in onset and/or coda position. Results showed that learners were largely influenced by their L1 orthographic knowledge when producing the target grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs). However, intergroup comparisons pointed to an advantage of CLIL learners over their EFL counterparts in most words, which reached statistical significance only for the initial “j” in “jam”, suggesting that gains were word specific. The attested moderate benefits of CLIL warrant further longitudinal research of other potentially problematic GPCs for Spanish young learners of English.