Teaching English as a second language in primary school: a comparison between kindergarden and fifth grade teaching practices

Résumé En

In France, children attend primary school from three to eleven years old and they start to learn a foreign language in first grade, around six. Some teachers however willingly begin to teach a foreign language to children when they enter kindergarden, at three. Research in SLA in a school environment has shown that children learn foreign languages differently according to their age (Thiessen & Yee, 2010, Lenart, 2021). Putting aside the discussion over the best age to learn a L2, research has shown that young children learn languages implicitly - without comparing languages to another language - while older children explicitly learn foreign languages, through conscious learning processes (Godfroid, 2021; Lenneberg, 1967; Krashen, 1975). Drawing on the literature on how young learners learn a foreign language, we analyze how teachers teach foreign languages to them.This study aims at identifying how teachers teach English as a foreign language to the children of three to five (kindergarden) and children of ten and eleven (fifth grade) in public schools in Paris. We analyze how kindergarden teachers and fifth-grade teachers adjust to their pupils when they teach a foreign language.The data is composed of video and audio recordings of two classes of children aged 3 to 5 and two classes of children aged 10 to 11, teachers’ notes, and preparation sheets. Results show that teachers of young learners in the classes we filmed often use the same teaching tools (flashcards, rituals, games, children’s books, songs…) but with different intentions and expectations as it comes to the pupils’ learning outcomes. In the kindergarden classes, teachers expect the children to merely understand the meaning of a given situation in L2 whereas in fifth grade, teacher expect children to also understand the construction of the language itself.ReferencesGodfroid, A. (2021). Implicit and Explicit Learning and Knowledge. In H. Mohebbi & C. Coombe (Eds.), Research Questions in Language Education and Applied Linguistics: A Reference Guide (pp. 823–829). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79143-8_142Krashen, S. D. (1975). The critical period for language acquisition and its possible bases. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 263(1), 211–224. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1975.tb41585.xLenart, E. (2021). Y a-t-il des avantages à l’apprentissage précoce d’une langue étrangère ? : Les premières productions d’élèves francophones en anglais langue étrangère à l’école primaire. In A. Arslangul, R. Rast, & M. Watorek (Eds.), Premières étapes dans l’acquisition des langues étrangères: Dialogue entre acquisition et didactique des langues (pp. 269–289). Presses de l’Inalco. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pressesinalco.42439Lenneberg, E. H. (1967). The Biological Foundations of Language. Hospital Practice, 2(12), 59–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/21548331.1967.11707799Thiessen, E. D., & Yee, M. N. (2010). Dogs, Bogs, Labs, and Lads: What Phonemic Generalizations Indicate About the Nature of Children’s Early Word-Form Representations. Child Development, 81(4), 1287–1303. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01468.x