Language Teaching for Young Learners - Online First

This report assesses the use of a Moodle Learning Management System (LMS) to provide an in-service language training programme for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in a primary school in Shanghai, China. The 12-month oral English training programme featured unique in-depth university-school collaborations, tiered project management and flexible self-directed learning experiences by the participants. This programme was a piloting project aimed at exploring an effective way of workplace language training and usefulness of Moodle-LMS’ potential in providing a flexible and interactive learning environment for training primary school language teachers.

This article aims to provide an overview of the types of questions and concerns adult researchers working with children in L2 education need to consider when it comes to navigating research ethics. Questions and dilemmas relating to ethical practice in child-focussed research are complex, and will be rooted in political, legal and contextual concerns, and interpretations of what is ethical in any one project will depend on the adult researcher’s convictions about research paradigms, their epistemological stance and their beliefs and priorities in the given situation. This article suggests five main questions to consider when it comes to research with children. All five components are equally important and decisions relating to one component will influence all others in the framework. This paper examines the complexities in more detail, discusses some differences relevant in the two main ‘paradigms’ of child-focussed research and how these principles interact with the constraints and the affordances of the local contexts, the focus of the intended study and the background and personal theories of the adult researcher.

Although the teaching of English to primary school children has been rapidly growing in many English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) countries around the world, a shortage of specialist teachers remains a persistent challenge. Consequently, non-specialists, such as homeroom teachers initially trained as generalists, are more often required to teach English. The present study, focusing on 304 non-specialist teachers serving in Japan’s public primary schools, was designed to explore their perceived self-efficacy for teaching English, and to examine the impact of teacher characteristics (i.e., their perceived English proficiency, English-teaching experience, and appraisals of collaboration with native English-speaking teachers) on their level of self-efficacy. A multiple regression analysis revealed that the collaboration variable was more influential than the proficiency variable and that there was no significant relationship between teachers’ self-efficacy and teaching experience. Moreover, integration of these results and teachers’ comments in the open-ended question suggested that they functioned most effectively in student engagement by playing roles unique to non-specialist teachers and that they perceived team teaching to be more beneficial in classroom management than solo teaching. Implications for in-service training are discussed to support non-specialist teachers in primary English education.