Aprendizaje en contextos de lengua única y de mezcla de lenguas

Abstract

Bilingualism and multilingualism are natural and common phenomena. Therefore, language change is also a normal process despite the fact that the use of L1 in the classroom was demonized in the 20th century pedagogical tradition of language teaching. In fact, in formal education the code switching in class is often discouraged. This chapter presents a state of the art on the approach to the use of L1 during language learning, as a framework for an empirical study in which 40 bilingual speakers of Basque and Spanish participated. The aim of this experiment was to understand whether the code switching during the presentation of new information can condition the language comprehension process or not. For this purpose, three fictitious countries were created and 50 characteristics of each were described. The listening task had to be heard only once and understood to answer fifty multiple- choice questions about those countries. These three audios were presented in a monolingual way and also in mixed-language mode. The results suggest that there is no evidence of differences produced by linguistic contexts in the amount of information memorized. Similarly, no differences were found in learning rates, measured as differences between pre and post exposure tests, depending on the language used to present the new information. Therefore, it is possible to assure that there is no evidence of an advantage of learning in a single language over mixed learning contexts.