The impact of orthographic congruence on phonological awareness: evidence from CLIL and EFL primary Spanish schoolchildren

Abstract Orthographic congruence can interfere in L2 speech learning, especially in contexts where learners are highly exposed to the written form and at younger ages when grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences are still not fully settled. The present study explored the identification of English (mis)pronunciations based on Spanish and English grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) in a CLIL group and English as a foreign language (EFL) group of young Spanish primary L2 children. Participants demonstrated significantly greater accuracy in accepting English words pronounced according to English GPCs, compared to their performance in rejecting English words pronounced with Spanish GPCs, which did not exceed chance level. The CLIL group only modestly accepted correct pronunciations more often compared to the EFL group. No significant differences were observed between male and female participants. The results suggest that these young learners were not consistently able to reject mispronunciations influenced by their L1 GPCs. Results suggested that CLIL instruction may offer some mitigation of these effects at this early stage of language acquisition.