Early Learning and Teaching of English

New Dynamics of Primary English

Jelena Mihaljević Djigunović, Marta Medved Krajnović, Jelena Mihaljević Djigunović, Marta Medved Krajnović

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783093403
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Psicolinguistica

This book offers an insight into the dynamics and complexities of learning and teachingEnglish as a foreign language at primary level. Taking a Dynamic Systems Theory perspective, the chapters present the findings of longitudinal research undertaken in Croatia into the development of English in young learners. The book includes both qualitative and quantitative research and provides insights into internal individual learner factors and external micro and macro contextual factors which impact English learner development. Importantly, it tackles the unique position of English in today's globalised world in detail. It therefore makes a major contribution to work on learning English by the digitalised generation and to understanding the impact of practices in the modern EFL classroom. The volume will appeal to anyone interested in new ways of researching the complex and dynamic phenomenon of the early learning of English.

1Context and Structure of the Study

Jelena Mihaljević Djigunović

An Overview of Research into the Processes of Early English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Learning in Croatia

Early studies

The project Learning English from an Early Age: Analysis of Learner Language, whose findings are presented and discussed in the following chapters, did not start from scratch. It relied on decades of research on early learning of foreign languages (FLs) that was initiated during the 1970s by Mirjana Vilke of Zagreb University. Her interest in the role of the critical period, together with her wish to find the optimal starting age for the introduction of FL into the primary curriculum, resulted in several projects. The major findings in these projects were of the world wide significance and some of them are presented below.

Following Lenneberg’s (1967) idea that the incidence of ‘language learning blocks’ increases after puberty, in her early research (1976a, 1976b, 1979, 1988), Vilke tried to find out whether, and to what degree, pre-puberty children learned EFL with greater ease than learners who had passed the critical period of ‘maturation of the brain’. Her experimental study, in which she compared 60 beginners aged nine and 60 beginners aged 17, showed that older beginners performed better on the phonological, morphological, and syntactic post-tests at the perception level. However, post-tests at the production level showed striking phonological differences in favour of younger beginners: while older beginners’ oral production was characterized by many L1 approximations, younger beginners’ production showed native-like characteristics in pronunciation (e.g. when pronouncing alveolar t and d in words like bedroom, which older beginners replaced with Croatian dental t and d) and intonation. In terms of morphological aspects, articles – non-existent in their L1 – were found to present equal difficulties to both age groups, while a number of morphological relations tested (e.g. singular and plural of demonstratives) seemed to be too abstract for pre-puberty children. Interesting findings were obtained at the lexical level as well: younger beginners remembered easily those words that referred to concepts which were already part of their experience and mental repertoire (e.g. bedroom), but had great difficulty in mastering words like drawing room, which they could not fully conceptualize (most of the participants lived in small flats).

Investigating attitudes towards and motivation for EFL learning on 70 children aged 6–7, Vilke found that children’s initial attitudes reflected their parents’, but that they were soon replaced by attitudes that young learners formed on the basis of their language learning experiences and relationship with their EFL teacher. Interesting observations were made regarding parents’ attitudes too. Many had neutral and some even entertained negative attitudes towards their children’s learning of EFL at the start of the study. As a result of the children’s enthusiasm about their English classes, however, the parents’ attitudes turned positive by the end of the study. In terms of motivational orientations, children were found to want to master English in order to be able to communicate with foreigners, to travel abroad, and to understand films and music in English. Intensity of motivation was, to a great extent, related to the EFL teacher and her approach to children as well as to teaching young learners. On the basis of her analyses of the same young learners’ errors from a longitudinal perspective, Vilke found that, contrary to Dulay and Burt’s (1973) findings, children who learn English not as a second language but as a foreign one exhibit more interference than developmental errors. She attributed this to the significant differences in language exposure in these two different contexts: when children learn a FL under limited exposure conditions, L1 interference is much stronger, and it changes the ‘natural order’ of acquisition. Vilke also observed that children with above-average IQ scores found language learning easy already at age six, while by age eight most children managed EFL learning well. Therefore, she suggested that age eight should be considered the optimal starting age in the Croatian context at the time.

The 1991–2001 experimental project

Another set of insights that the Learning English from an Early Age: Analysis of Learner Language project is based on stems from research done as part of the 1991–2001 national longitudinal experimental project on early learning of foreign languages which was coordinated by Mirjana Vilke and Yvonne Vrhovac. The project was part of the medium-term Council of Europe programme entitled Language Learning for European Citizenship, which included a network of projects from 20 European countries and Canada. Three generations of Croatian first graders (age 6/7) learning one of four FLs (English, French, German, and Italian) were followed during the eight years of their primary education. The sample included over 1000 young learners. The project’s activities went in two directions: a group of applied linguists investigated relevant aspects of young learners’ characteristics and language performance, while each of the FL teachers was encouraged to rely on their own style of teaching, to follow their intuitions, and to be guided by the needs of the group of children they were teaching. The only thing the teachers were specifically asked to do in their classes was to make their pupils feel relaxed and happy so that receptive learning (Curran, 1972) could take place. FL teaching was organized so that in Grades 1 and 2, the children had five lessons (45 minutes each) of their respective FL per week, four weekly lessons in Grades 3 and 4, and three in Grades 5 to 8. While during the first four grades classes were split into two groups so that there were between 12 and 15 learners in a group, from Grade 5 on, language learning proceeded in intact classes with up to 30 learners per class. In each project school there was a control group – a Grade 4 class (age 9/10) where learners had just started their FLL according to the national curriculum, which at the time stipulated the introduction of FL in Grade 4. The control groups had two lessons of FL per week in Grade 4, three lessons from Grade 5 on, and the teaching was done in large groups (intact classes). They were followed in the same way as the experimental classes.

The findings (e.g. Mihaljević Djigunović & Vilke, 2000; Vilke & Vrhovac, 1993, 1995; Vrhovac, 2001; Vrhovac et al., 1999) showed that teachers found the work with young learners very difficult but highly rewarding. It required them to invest a lot of physical energy as well as emotional engagement, which Vilke (1995: 6) termed TER (total emotional response). The children became so attached to their teachers that their relationship influenced the children’s attitudes and motivation to a high degree. Classroom activities were limited in duration to ten minutes in order to keep the young learners on task, and it was when they experienced the process of FLL as a kind of game that they were most eager to contribute. Although practically all the children were highly motivated and had positive attitudes towards FLL, individual differences were found in terms of some personal traits: at the very beginning some children were extremely shy and had to be allowed not to join in until they felt ready, regardless of what may have pleased the teacher; while some children were able to use their imagination a lot, the imaginations of others had yet to be aroused. Content-related teaching and storytelling were found to be two highly productive ways of teaching during the first four years. Comparisons of experimental and control EFL learners showed that the experimental learners were overall better than the controls. As far as motivation and attitudes were concerned, while the control learners’ motivation decreased with years of learning, the experimental learners in most cases maintained their levels of motivation, in some cases even increasing them, till the end of primary education. In terms of language achievement, at the end of Grade 8, the experimental learners were found to be better than the controls in pronunciation, orthography, vocabulary, and reading. Interestingly, the controls performed better at grammar tests that required explicit knowledge of the grammatical system. The experimental learners scored significantly better on the C-test, which was used as a measure of overall competence in English. Based on the findings of this longitudinal project, it was proposed that introducing a FL into the primary curriculum from Grade 1 could enable learners to develop positive attitudes towards and high motivation for FLL, as well as achieve desired levels of language competence if three conditions were met: early FLL should be organized in groups comprising not more than 15 learners, in the first years it should be intensive (optimally four–five classes weekly), and the teachers should be specifically trained to teach young learners.

Description of the Current Project

The project Acquisition of English from an early age: Analysis of learner language started in 2007 as a five-year research project sponsored by the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Sport. The research team included ten researchers who, with the help of a varying number of assistants, conceptualized and carried out research activities during the five years. Investigations were carried out according to a pre-set protocol for each year.

The current context

Like any FLL context, Croatia has its specific characteristics that may distinguish it from some other contexts. However, it has far more similarities with other European socio-educational contexts than differences. This can be seen from previous and already mentioned studies on early EFL learning carried out in Croatia whose findings confirm and extend insights obtained elsewhere. More recently, the transnational Early Language Learning in Europe (ELLiE) project (www.ellieresearch.eu), which involved Croatian young EFL learners as well, showed that the data collected in Croatia were comparable to six other European contexts (England, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and Sweden).

The ELLiE study (Enever, 2011) followed young beginners of English in six countries and young beginners of French and Spanish in the seventh (England). The findings showed that the primary FLL processes in Croatia share all the key characteristics with the corresponding processes in the other countries. Thus, for example, the primary curriculum is centralized and in Grades 1–4 all EFL learners have two 45-minute lessons per week like in the Polish context; coursebooks are commonly used in teaching EFL like in Italy, Poland and Spain; in terms of oracy development in the first foreign language the aimed target at the end of Grade 4 is level A1 of the Common European Framework (2001) like in England, Italy, Poland, and Spain; like in all the ELLiE countries (except England, of course), English is the foreign language of choice, etc.

As already pointed out above, data collected from the Croatian cohort in the ELLiE study are comparable to those in the other six countries. In her analysis of the Croatian data Mihaljević Djigunović (2012) found that taking a contextualized approach to researching ELL helps put both the processes and the outcomes of primary English into perspective. The context in this sense is not a limiting factor which obstructs possible generalizations of findings, but a necessary pre-requisite for understanding the ELL process which has become a universal phenomenon taking place in increasingly similar contexts of the globalized world we live in.

In order for the reader to obtain a closer look into and understanding of the key aspects of the socio-educational context in which the studies described in the following chapters took place, we will briefly describe its main characteristics.

For more than six decades now, the Croatian educational system has consisted of a primary education stage, which lasts eight years, followed by a three-or four-year secondary education stage, and a tertiary stage including college or university education with its undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate levels. Primary education is compulsory and consists of a lower primary phase (Grades 1 to 4; ISCED level 1) and an upper primary phase (Grades 5 to 8; ISCED level 2). Early introduction of FLs into the curriculum dates back to the first half of the 20th century (Vilke, 2007). In the beginning, the starting age was 10–11, that is, Grade 4 or 5, depending on the availability of qualified teachers. Since 2003, FL has been a compulsory subject in the primary curriculum from Grade 1. Different FLs have been popular since then, but in recent years, English has become the most attractive, as it is in many other European contexts. At the moment, over 85% of learners take English as their first FL in Grade 1, about 10% take German, and the rest take French or Italian (Medved Krajnović & Letica, 2009). The role of English is underscored by a regulation that those learners who did not start with English in Grade 1 have to take it in Grade 4 as a compulsory subject. In case of those learners who did start with English in Grade 1, a second FL is offered later during primary education only as an optional subject but still many students do take it. All this means that no learner is supposed to leave primary school without having learned English, be it as a first or a second FL. Since Croatian educational authorities follow the recommendations of the Council of Europe and aim at two FLs for all, a second FL is offered during secondary education (ISCED level 3), as well. At the college and university levels FL can be a compulsory or an optional course, depending on the programme. Being a rather small country whose economy relies heavily on tourism, the learning of FLs features as a high priority on policy makers’ lists, although this is not always reflected in the amount of state investment in FLL. Still, generally speaking, attitudes towards FLL are very positive, especially in the case of English.

In Grades 1 to 4 of primary school, learners have two English lessons per week. From Grade 5 to Grade 8, they have three English lessons per week. All primary schools in the country follow the guidelines stated in the national framework curriculum. In terms of foreign languages, it quotes CEFR level A1 as the desirable target to be achieved by the end of Grade 4, and CEFR level A2 as target for the end of Grade 8. In cases English is a second FL, the target for the end of Grade 8 is level A1+.

Exposure to English outside school is extensive. Primary EFL learners have ample opportunity to hear English in foreign films and TV series (foreign programmes shown on national television are not dubbed) and music, or use it in computer games or to communicate through social networks. Opportunities for personal contact with English-speaking people are also numerous, especially with foreign tourists visiting Croatia during the summer. In the ELLiE project’s comparison of mean hours of weekly exposure to English, Croatian young learners came second only to Sweden and were found to be more exposed than young learners in the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Italy (Muñoz & Lindgren, 2011).

Croatian primary classes are generally monolingual. The only exception are schools situated near the border, where there are learners whose L1 is not Croatian. A typical primary class has 28 pupils on average.

To teach English in primary school, teachers need a university degree. There are two pathways in obtaining such a degree. One is by getting a university degree in English Language and Literature (teaching stream), the other is by obtaining a university degree in early education with a minor in English. While in the former case, the teacher can work in any type of educational institution (from kindergarten to university), the latter qualifies an individual only for teaching English in primary school. Like in many other European contexts (Enever, 2011), due to a shortage of qualified staff, in so...