Abstract
Teaching English to young learners has gained speed in the past twenty years. Many countries in Europe are offering English at the primary level as advised by the EU. The efforts to lower the age for foreign language learning have echoed in countries in Asia as well. Turkey as one of these countries has changed its educational policy in 2012 and launched the new English Language Teaching Program for grades 2-8 in 2013. Along with many changes, the new system offers EFL in the second grade. The present study not only aims to investigate the views of prospective ELT teachers towards this change, but also to compare their views with those of trainers, and English teachers who were investigated in the earlier phases of the study. The results indicate that although all three groups of participants favor an earlier start in foreign language education, there are significant differences between groups in terms of the appropriate starting time and teaching methodologies used. Teachers were indecisive as they favored both the first and second tiers to introduce a foreign language. The results have implications for policy makers, teachers, teacher trainers, and prospective teachers.
Highlights
The global tendency to learn foreign languages (FL) at a younger age has been of influence to the educational policies of many countries
The results of the descriptive statistics with regard to the views about appropriate tier to start foreign language education (FLE) were presented in table 1from the most frequently agreed to the least agreed one
Nuremberg Recommendations on Early Foreign Language Learning (Widlok, et al, 2011) and European Commission’s report on Education and Training (n.d.) identified the teacher qualifications and contextual requirements for early language learning (ELL); as with any curriculum innovation, in addition to providing necessary conditions for learning, it is important to harken the stakeholders that will be affected by those changes. With this aim in mind the present study focused on prospective teachers (PTs), teachers, and teacher trainers (TTs) opinions regarding the starting age for FLE and the use of appropriate methodologies with young learners (YL)
Summary
The global tendency to learn foreign languages (FL) at a younger age has been of influence to the educational policies of many countries. Economic liberalization accomplished via governments, international organizations and/or corporations is the result of “free market” global economy (Enever & Moon, 2009), which in turn triggered the need for English-speaking work-force. Being the lingua franca, learning English has gained importance at the international level. The governments were forced by this global trend “downwards”, and by the parents, “upwards” to meet the needs of the global community (Enever & Moon, 2009). Many countries in Europe (Finland, France, Norway, Italy etc.) and Asia (Turkey, China, India, Taiwan etc.) made changes in their educational policies to involve English as a compulsory school subject at the primary level
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