Language Teaching for Young Learners - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2024

Demand for an understanding and appreciation of linguistic and cultural diversity in educational contexts has intensified, given increasing levels of globalization. Moreover, guidelines from educational agencies (e.g., United Nations, 2015b; U.S. Department of Education, 2017) as well as state-level preschool teaching standards call for raising awareness of languages, cultures, and diversity beginning in early childhood. However, limited research in that area suggests most U.S. pre-primary teachers are monolingual English speakers (Espinosa & Crandell, 2021). Additionally, professional development and instructional programs on language and cultural awareness in pre-primary classrooms are rare (Kearney & Barbour, 2015). These observations raise the question as to how pre-primary educators promote linguistic and cultural diversity in their classrooms.

This study explores world language learning practices in state-licensed, Northeastern U.S. pre-primary schools. We administered an online survey about world language learning resources, pedagogical approaches, and classroom practices to 138 pre-primary educators and conducted individual, semi-structured interviews with 15 of the teachers. We calculated frequency distributions for survey items to determine consensus or discrepancy among teachers and applied the procedure of initial, axial, and selective coding (Friedman, 2012) to open-ended survey responses and interview transcripts to identify trends and refine themes. Findings show that teachers recognized the benefits of building language and cultural awareness. Despite limited time, training, and resources to implement such pedagogy, they included different languages and cultures in instruction. We present their practices, focusing in particular on three distinct approaches, and discuss implications for promoting pre-primary plurilingual and (inter)cultural education.

Intercultural encounters are important sites for intercultural learning. Hence the teaching of English as a foreign language should include possibilities for learners to engage in such encounters. It is theoretically suggested and empirically supported, that encounters with texts and images can be fruitful for intercultural learning. Picturebooks constitute one form of literary text that is suitable for teaching foreign languages to children. This study suggests that purposefully selected picturebooks can create affordances for intercultural encounters in the early English as a foreign language classroom, thus contributing to intercultural learning from an early age. Selected learner data collected in a qualitative multiple case study with learners from 8 to10 years old, interacting with two English language picturebooks, were analyzed using deductive, qualitative content analysis. The analyses showed that learners displayed awareness of several intercultural encounters with and between characters in the picturebooks, especially encounters that included the two child protagonists. These encounters were based on multiple cultural group affiliations, including affiliations based on a more traditional as well as an extended view of culture, which included non-human groups. It is concluded that, based on a non-essentialist view of culture, the selected picturebooks and their teaching sequences created affordances for learners’ awareness of different cultural affiliations, which is considered a prerequisite for engagement in intercultural encounters.

Intercultural education has constituted an interdisciplinary teaching principle in Austrian upper and lower secondary curricula since 1992 and was reinforced by a decree in 2017. Literary texts have been identified as promising resources and valuable tools for initiating intercultural learning through their frequently inherent multi-perspectivity encouraging students to empathize with characters, consider different perspectives, contrast viewpoints, relate stories to personal experiences, and reflect on diverse ideas. However, research on the implementation of intercultural teaching and learning using literature in foreign language classrooms has so far mostly focused on upper secondary education and has frequently related to using postcolonial fiction writings. To counter the knowledge gap on the implementation of intercultural learning in lower educational levels, this study adopts a literary science approach to explore the potential of picturebooks in early secondary EFL classrooms. Using The Little Green Jacket (Dee, 2020), it specifically examines perspective-taking as a key dimension of intercultural learning. Through written learner reflections, the research study assesses whether students in two Austrian EFL classrooms (n = 35) can adopt a different viewpoint. The findings show that most students are successful, or at least partly successful, in perspective-taking and mostly describe emotions of sadness but also hopefulness in their reflective writings. Thus, the study suggests that picturebooks have the potential to facilitate perspective-taking as an essential dimension of intercultural education among young EFL learners with low language proficiency, highlighting their largely untapped potential in early language education.

Virtual Exchange, by definition, connects groups of students in different countries for online intercultural communication (Lewis & O’Dowd, 2016). This exploratory study presents and analyses an asynchronous video exchange between sixth grade students in two countries with the goal of exploring which of Byram’s objectives for intercultural communicative competence (2021) can be addressed with young learners. The asynchronous video exchange project presented in this article was carried out between young English learners in Germany and English L1 speakers in the United States. Transcripts and observation notes from project meetings in Germany and transcripts of two videoconferences held with the two groups at the beginning and end of the exchange were analyzed qualitatively using Byram’s objectives for intercultural communicative competence (2021) as deductive codes in order to reveal which objectives were addressed during the exchange project. Eighteen of Byram’s 30 objectives were addressed to some degree in the current project. Those objectives will be discussed and considerations for future exchanges will be presented in view of these initial results.

The PEACE project was a teaching unit which was designed, implemented and evaluated in two primary school classes in Japan and Germany respectively. The project was carried out in an asynchronous virtual exchange format between the two classes. The Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture was used as a basis for the teaching unit, with the framework’s descriptors for young learners serving as tools for designing and assessing both the teaching unit and its outcomes in the form of the participating students’ products and utterances. Using the NVivo coding software for content analysis, the study investigated the deployment of the various areas of competence by the students during the teaching unit and compared these across the classes. This was done to gain insights into both the context-dependency of the deployment of competences for democratic culture as well as the practicability and potentials of carrying out a bilateral asynchronous virtual exchange aiming to promote competences for democratic culture in young learners.