The Incidence of Doodling on English Vocabulary Development in Fourth-Graders through a Didactic Unit Sequence using CLIL in a Bilingual School in Tuluá.

Abstract

Considering the English proficiency that elementary students must be placed in according to the Ministerio de Educación Nacional (MEN, 2006) requirements in a bilingual context, it was not met at all. Thus, any teaching strategy which is liable to get students appealed to the act of learning useful English is more than appropriate. Consequently, this study is framed on English vocabulary development as a path to allow the learner a better advancement of a second language. But when it comes to learning new vocabulary in a second language, it is almost well-nigh impossible to assert that this is a piece of cake. As a rule of thumb, students get easily bored when being taught new words belonging to the English language. Therefore, doodling comes in very handy as a learning tool given the fact that people make use of it as a gesture of visual thinking according to authors. Along these lines, the present study aims at analyzing the incidence of doodling on English vocabulary development through the implementation of a didactic unit using CLIL in fourth-grade students in a bilingual school. As well, the present investigation was subscribed in a quantitative approach adopting the quasi-experimental design and an explanatory scope, in which two groups of fourth-grade belonging to the bilingual sector were taken as experimental and control group, which were preceded by the implementation of a pre-test, exposure to doodling strategy only for the experimental group, and a post-test at the end to determine the incidence of doodling. Finally, the research presented results that the implementation of doodling has a positive impact on the students' vocabulary development.