“Too Young to Learn English?”—Nurturing Preschool Children’s English Language Learning across an Early Years Curriculum: A Case Study

Abstract

School readiness can be used as a key target to support children’s social, emotional, language, and a wide range of communication skills, particularly to promote equity for children in a democratic society. This is especially important for Portuguese children attending early years foundation settings, as considering “school readiness” creates a much broader educational base for school subjects to subsequently build upon and, in particular, nurturing early years foundation stage Portuguese children’s literacy development in English, the privileged language of international communication. However, little is known about how the English language can be best taught at such young ages, as well as the unique outcomes from such an early exposure, at least in the Portuguese context. Language play has been argued to be a “universal” feature common to all human beings, regardless of their age. This study set out to prepare young preschool children with an English language background for the primary school years. As such, this study examined the impact of exposing children to classroom-based storybook reading sessions and original cartoon-based created materials, hence creating a print-referencing-style environment carried out during an academic year. The impacts on preschoolers’ early literacy development were examined, focusing specifically on the domain of print knowledge. The study reported here set out to determine to what extent a play-based, cross-curricular pedagogic programme for learning English, fastened in CLIL principles (English across the curriculum), could be effective in promoting early literacy development within an early years setting in Portugal, thus preparing children for the formal years of primary school to come. Fifteen native Portuguese preschool children (3–5 years old) were the focus of this study. Their engagement in English lessons was investigated through audio recordings of peer and group conversations. Cross-reference content analyses were carried out separately, with audio recordings of lessons and researcher’s field notes as part of triangulation of the data.