English in Inclusive Multilingual Preschools. Kirsten Birsak de Jersey
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and the excitement of getting involved in learning them. It also values children’s language competences and contributes to a good rapport with their teachers. For example, I remember a situation when I could not manage the right pronunciation of a word in Turkish and suddenly I had about ten children around me all trying to teach me. Because of the philosophy to uphold mutual respect for all languages, the teacher education project that is the focus of the study here therefore began by the children telling everybody which other languages they spoke. During the participatory demonstration lessons (→ chapter 5.7.1) the opportunity was taken to encourage children to share their mother tongues and through this the children felt free to join in and share words in their various languages.
Relevance of an early start in English
Early language acquisition research commonly agrees that children tend to approach second or foreign language learning in a natural way showing only little or no anxiety and inhibitions as they are still in the early phases of coming to terms with their first language or languages. They have the ability to acquire languages intuitively and are “more attuned to the phonological system of the new language” (Pinter, 2006, p. 29).2 But this general statement needs to be substantiated with regard to the following specifications. Referring to Pinter (2011) Copland & Garton (2014) note that there are contradictory results of previous studies on the ‘younger is better’ hypothesis. They therefore note that “there is no conclusive evidence for the supposed benefits of early introduction of English into the curriculum” (p. 224). They argue that if early English is offered, success depends on the quality of “age-appropriate teaching” and “learners’ attitudes towards the language and their motivation to learn” (p. 225). In summarizing the state of available research findings, they note that
research-based publications into effective practices for teaching YLs continue to be quite rare. Database searches … still yield very few examples of empirical studies about the effect of pedagogies on early language learning. … It is clear that there remains a lack of classroom-based studies and ‘young learners’ in general remains an under-researched area. (pp. 226, 227)
It is for similar reasons that Piske (2017) also critically examines the reasons “why the high expectations regarding the outcomes of early foreign language programs many people appear to have had in the beginning have not always been met” (p. 45). Early foreign language education was introduced on the assumption that there is a critical or sensitive period during which children acquire languages more successfully than adolescents or adults (for a summary on research regarding the critical period hypothesis see pp. 45-47). The monocausal explanation of attainment in L2 learning has “led several researchers to ignore the potential influence of variables other than age-related variables on success in L2 Learning” (p. 46). They relate to the quality and amount of exposure to the target language, learners’ opportunities to use the language or teachers’ ability to create motivating learning environments (→ chapter 5.8. for further details). Finally, empirical studies that have been published under the heading of an early start in English have either researched children’s language competence development in primary school settings3 or in bilingual immersive elementary contexts (Piske et al., 2016; Seifert, 2016). Although results from both contexts support the introduction of an early start in English, the contexts that are represented in these empirical research studies differ from the language acquisition context of the multilingual inclusive state preschool which is the focus of the preschool teacher education study that is presented here. Results of these empirical studies can therefore not be directly transferred to this research. No studies have researched children’s English competence development in heterogeneous, non-privileged, inclusive, multi-lingual preschool classrooms to date. This has been criticized by language acquisition researchers and European education policy alike:
One consequence of training kindergarten teachers at secondary level (to date) in Austria has been that Austrian universities and research institutions (with a few exceptions) have occupied themselves little or not at all, with research referring to the kindergarten age group. The same is true, more or less, of the question of how 3 to 6 year olds relate to languages, or deal with various different languages. (Council of Europe, 2008a, p. 87)
Legutke et al. (2009) in their methodology for teaching English in the primary and preschool state that insights resulting from pilots in English language education (p. 140) are limited as research is conducted in exclusive language learning contexts:
[The results] were obtained with a predominantly monolingual group of German children. No pilots have been reported about multi-lingual groups of children, which today have become dominant in many urban and even rural areas. What is missing so far are … programs that consider all children of a given area. In conjunction with these pilots, the impact of factors such as diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, social status, and economic status of parents would have to be researched. (p. 141)
In some studies, that are situated in more privileged contexts, the issue of how to qualify teachers for preschools that “grant learning opportunities to all students, no matter what language and cultural background they have” (p. 141) is not addressed. A case in point is a recent study conducted by Seifert (2016). Her sample is a German-English bilingual elementary nursery school for one- to three-year-old children, which is attached to a university and therefore draws 90 % of its children from parents whose background is academic. As the author critically states herself, this sample hardly qualifies as representing the children currently attending elementary education (pp. 159-160). Other studies that are extensively documented on early language learning education are also located in bilingual acquisition contexts (Steinlein & Piske, 2016). The argument for introducing early English in a multilingual inclusive state preschool therefore cannot be directly derived from existing empirical research studies of documented successes of early English even though existing research in related primary and immersive elementary contexts at least implies that its introduction may be potentially worthwhile. However, a further argument strongly supports its introduction: it is the unquestionable need to provide equal learning opportunities for all the children:
Angesichts der Bildungsverantwortung des Elementarbereichs muss ernsthaft diskutiert werden, ob dem Kontakt mit einer ersten Fremdsprache … nicht selbstverständlich ein Platz zugestanden werden sollte. … Die Nachfrage nach kommerziellen Angeboten und Kindergärten mit bilingualen Programmen, deren Zahl sich in den letzten zehn Jahren verdreifacht haben soll, spiegelt den Elternwunsch. Da dieses Angebot aber nicht allen Kindern zugänglich ist, könnte in einem zentralen Entwicklungsbereich Chancenungleichheit entstehen. (Sambanis, 2016, p. 175)
Finally, yet importantly, it is with the background of my long-term experience and documented best practice examples of teaching English to all the children in the multilingual inclusive preschool that has motivated me to embark on this study (→ chapter 1.2). Its focus will be on the potential to develop preschool teachers’ competences to teach English, also because
many experts have emphasized that focusing on starting age as the key variable is misleading in foreign language contexts. The age factor is not the main issue. There is a lot more to success over time. The quality and quantity of early provision, teachers, programs, and continuity are more important. (Nikolov, 2016, p. 4; see also Nikolov, 2000; Singleton, 2014)
As the qualification of teachers, child-appropriate early language learning programs and the continuity of language programs (for example from preschool to primary education, and from primary education to secondary education) are believed to be just as important to successfully implement early language education as is the age factor, the next chapter will look more closely at the situation of foreign language learning in preschool as seen from the perspectives of education policy (both European and Austrian) and preschool teachers.
2.2 Recommendations of education policy for the preschool level
2.2.1 The European Commission’s recommendations
Chapter 2.2.1 looks at the official European Commission’s policy recommendations of early language teaching and learning which includes specific recommendations in its country report of the circumstances in Austria (Council of Europe, 2008a)