The Qualitative and Quantitative Rise of Literature on Teaching English to Young Learners

Abstract

When I started teaching English in the mid-1990s ‘young learner’ classes were an appendix to the adult business of out-of-school ELT. English as a subject or foreign language in primary mainstream education was tentatively being experimented with and introduced unsystematically and in different ways in various contexts. For example, in France, English was introduced into the last year of primary school in 1989 (M.E.N. 2001) and only reached 1st grade (Cours Préparatoire) in 2016, whereas Norway had introduced English in the upper levels of primary school in 1939 and officially into grade 1 in 1997 (Krulatz, Dahl, and Flognfeldt 2018). In addition, there was a dearth of literature focusing on teaching English to children and teenagers, as the ELT profession was largely based on adult perspectives on teaching and learning. My own MA in TEFL, in the early 2000s, only included one optional module on Teaching English to Young Learners (TEYL), although I chose to focus my research and assignments for all of my six optional modules on young learners. The bibliography included the seminal works of Brumfit, Moon, and Tongue (1991), Brewster, Ellis, and Girard (2002), Moon (2000), Cameron (2001), and others. These works had a significant impact on many teachers trained in the CELTA and DELTA tradition, who then grudgingly ended up in the growing numbers of classes of ever-younger learners. These books also brought attention to, and paved the way for, more intensive research into how young children learn foreign languages. Twenty years later, as we witness the rise of early language learning, the young learner classroom has become a mainstream research interest, generating much-needed theoretical insights and practice-based pedagogy; and I educate future primary teachers of English with a whole bookshelf dedicated to TEYL. The ‘Cinderella area’ of scholarship (Copland and Garton 2014: 223), where research and informed discussion were scarce, has now come of age (Rixon 2016, Copland and Garton 2014).