“English, let me join you!” The pedagogical potential of a short intercomprehension experience in a secondary school using songs in Germanic languages

This study explores two individual variables, language aptitudes and beliefs, before, during and after a short intercomprehension experience through songs in two Germanic languages, German and Dutch, with baccalaureate secondary school students, aged 16 and 17, attending a high school in Badalona, a city near Barcelona. A mixed-method methodology with a pre-post design was used to collect data, including one pre-test (n=44) and one post-test (n=46), as well as participants’ declarative data during the Germanic intercomprehension (ICG) experience with songs. After carrying out the ICG activity, the results reveal that participants have a slightly better ability to identify short-written fragments in the two target Germanic languages. In addition, there has been a change in students’ beliefs regarding their image as language learners. Participants also expressed a more favourable attitude towards exploring new languages and relying on prior linguistic knowledge after the ICG experience. These descriptive findings suggest promising avenues for further research on cognitive and affective variables in the scarcely explored field of intercomprehension.