Receptive Vocabulary Acquisition in Pre-Primary Education through Soft-Content and Language Integrated Learning

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has become the focus of Foreign (FL) research within last decades. CLIL provides a more complete, naturalistic, meaningful context to FL learning, which proven brings many benefits learners, such as higher motivation promotion creativity, better results in receptive skills, vocabulary, morphology fluency. Nevertheless, most focused on primary secondary level students and, thus, is needed with younger namely, pre-primary students. The present study examines learning vocabulary learners following soft-CLIL program, compared their same age peers Formal Instruction (FI) English. Over course six months, two grades, namely 4- 5-year-old (N=155), took part aiming at teaching curricular preschool units, traditionally taught mother tongue (L1), English sessions. A longitudinal was conducted, were administered general pre-test, well target words post-test after units had been worked on. acquisition, but word frequency effects also analyzed. Results showed positive tendencies development through soft-CLIL, although not statistically significant. significant effect found, indicating that high-frequency are recalled easily than lower-frequency ones, no differences found when comparing from grades.