A panorama of the teaching of additional languages to children in Brazil

Abstract

Despite not being compulsory, mainly in Brazilian public schools, the offering of an additional language/foreign language (AL/FL), especially English, to Young and Very Young Learners (EYL) has gained prominence over the years. Inscribed in the Applied Linguistics field, the aim of this study is to provide a tentative research panorama on the teaching of AL/FL to Young and very Young Learners. For that, we present the location of the universities, the context of the research and their research methods carried out by means of master’s dissertations and PhD theses presented during the period of 1987 through 2021. Our focus is on the author's motivation for developing the research on the theme. The results indicate that the great majority of the studies were developed by teachers who are teaching AL/FL to children in the early years of schooling and investigated researchers' own practice, being developed for the purpose of undertaking a master's degree. That practice comprises diverse contexts of research and a variety of ages and groups which were either investigated or took part in the master’s and PhD studies.