Do young learners know how to learn a foreign language?

Abstract

It is not often that there is a need to publish a book made up of chapters selected from three previously published books. The Croatian national research project Investigating learning and acquisition of foreign languages at an early school age (led by Mirjana Vilke) and its sequel Investigating learning and acquisition of foreign languages in primary school (led by Yvonne Vrhovac), with their unique experimental longitudinal design and involving four foreign languages, caught attention of the international audience from the very start. The interest has continued to this day.With the growing importance of English as a modern lingua franca teaching English to young learners has spread to practically all parts of the world. This global change, combined with a lack of systematic studies into early language learning in the formal setting, has made findings such as those of the Croatian research highly valuable.The three volumes describing early learning and teaching of English as a foreign language to Croatian young learners from which the chapters in this book were selected – all called Children and foreign languages – were published in 1993, 1995 and 2001, respectively. What is quite unique to the three volumes, and to the present book, is that they offer an in-depth view into early teaching and learning of English from two perspectives: the researchers’ perspective and the teachers’ perspective.