English in Inclusive Multilingual Preschools. Kirsten Birsak de Jersey
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teachers' attitudes towards introducing foreign languages, in general, and English, in particular, in preschool by asking them to comment on widespread popular ideas of early language learning that they were exposed to in their community with a focus on preschool teachers’ perceived benefits or disadvantages for the children (→ question 3).
3 preschool teachers' attitudes towards introducing English in preschool in general and regarding the potential introduction of English at their preschool in particular, their personal prerequisites and professional qualifications to teach English with a focus on preschool teachers’ perceived benefits or disadvantages they would associate for themselves as teachers (→ question 4).
4 I would need to identify a preschool that could be used as sample for the teacher education research project that would qualify as being representative for both teachers’ and children’s educational backgrounds and the preschool’s teachers would need to be prepared to commit themselves to actively participate as a community of practice in the project (the procedure of the selection of an appropriate sample will be addressed in chapter 6.2).
The resulting set-up of the questionnaire is as follows: it first establishes the contextual framework that the preschool teachers work in and then relates their work to the teachers’ personal opinions towards introducing English in their preschool contexts. The sequence of questions was motivated by my awareness of preschool teachers’ reluctant attitudes towards introducing English in preschool through my comprehensive contact and experience with many preschool teachers. At the beginning of the project, I was well aware of the issue that the potential introduction of English in preschool had become amongst them. The topic was (and still is) very controversial and the preschool teachers only talked about it by taking the perspective of the potential benefit or the perceived disadvantage for the children and never considered the benefits or disadvantages that a professional development project might involve for themselves. For this reason, the perspective of the children was addressed first in the questionnaire (→ question 3). Through this, it was intended to convey to participating preschool teachers that the children's well-being was also important to me, that I had considered it too. If they were to come to believe that I would perceive preschool teachers only from the perspective of a teacher educator / researcher and native speaker wishing to introduce English into their preschool, the questionnaire might have failed: it would perhaps have become an emotional medium of protest against what they possibly considered to be an imposition and unreasonable demand put on them from the outside. Focusing on the children first meant they did not have to be defensive about their attitudes but could openly include and discuss their perspectives from the start. As a result, participation in the questionnaire survey was highly satisfactory as 30 out of 33 preschools participated.
The questionnaire consisted of close-ended questions with response options mainly of true-false items (that included the choices of yes, partly and no) following the idea of the Likert scale (Dörnyei 2007, pp. 105-107). To understand participants’ reasons for their choices they were asked to write explanatory comments for each of their options so that they could be reconstructed and interpreted in the data analysis phase.
The response options of the true-false items will be evaluated quantitatively through the IBM SPSS Statistics programme: version 24 (2016). The data will be presented in the form of tables, graphs and pie diagrams. Participants’ reasons for their choices will be further analysed qualitatively by selecting representative key quotes from participants’ explanatory comments. On first inspection of teachers’ comments, it emerged that they often did not restrict their points of view to correspond with the focus of a particular question. For the data analysis this means that I will select comments that are relevant to the focus of each question rather than limiting myself to relate a comment only to the question that intended to prompt it. Therefore, the questions that correspond to the key quotes are noted in code form in brackets at the end of the quotes to be able to retrace the source that triggered the data in a valid way (for example: qu. 4c-1 or final comment). Chosen options that are connected to the comments are included in the coding (for example: qu. 3b-1: yes).
As the questionnaire distinguished between preschool teachers’ attitudes towards introducing English as seen from the perspectives of the children (→ question 3) and as seen from the perspectives of the preschool teachers (→ question 4) validity of findings is supported through the strategy of ‘within-method triangulation’ in the questionnaire, which allows to identify convergence of the two perspectives (Altrichter & Posch, 2007, pp. 178-179; see also Denzin, 1978 & Flick, 2004).
The questionnaire was written in German; the questions have been translated in English for this publication. The preschool teachers’ comments were handwritten and directly taken from the questionnaires for the analysis purpose. The transcription follows the guidelines of a simple transcription system (cf. Dresing et al., 2015, pp. 27-28). The transcription is literal and only language mistakes are corrected. Words and phrases that contained features of the Austrian German vernacular are transcribed in German to support understanding of the data.
Results of the questionnaire survey are presented in the next chapters following the purposes of the questionnaire as has been outlined in the introduction to this chapter. The analysis of data will be used to draw consequences for the set-up of the teacher education project to provide support for participating preschool teachers so that their needs are able to be addressed appropriately.
3.2 Survey of state preschool teachers’ contexts of work
The identification of a preschool that would qualify to represent the working conditions of the general educational state preschool context in the Salzburg area would require an analysis that ideally involved all the state preschools in this education context. Questions therefore first aimed to identify the preschool’s size which included the number of groups in a preschool and the group size (→ question 1a, 1b) and the number of children who spoke German as a second or third language (→ question 1c). This would indicate how many preschools were multilingual in profile. The next question aimed to find out if preschools provided support for the children to learn German and who was responsible to teach it (→ question 2a). This would provide an insight both in the workload of the staff and in their experience in the area of language teaching. Finally, the contextual framework also included the question of how many preschools actually offered English, and if they did offer English, whether the preschool teachers themselves taught English or if it were taught by external staff. It also aimed to find out if English was an integral part of an individual preschool’s programme and in what way it was organised (→ question 2b).
Results are presented in the following chapters.
3.2.1 The size and characteristics of children’s groups
State preschools vary from area to area. Some of the preschools are small with only one or two groups while others have up to five or six groups, depending on whether they are situated in a densely populated area or not. The size of the groups also varies. There is also a quite substantial diversity when it comes to children’s language profiles. While in some preschools almost all the children learn German as a second or third language, other preschools only have a few children with a multilingual background in their groups. Despite this heterogeneity of state preschool contexts, it would be necessary to identify a type of preschool that would qualify to be representative for the majority of preschools in this context as only then a suitable sample for the teacher education research could be identified. Data that provided this information resulted from the following questions:
How many groups are in your preschool? (Wie viele Gruppen gibt es in Ihrem Kindergarten?) (question 1a).
How many children are in your group? (Wie viele Kinder sind in Ihrer Gruppe?) (question 1b).
How many children speak German as their second or third language? (Für wie viele Kinder ist Deutsch die zweite oder dritte Sprache?) (question 1c).
In statistical data 1 (below) the horizontal bar shows the number of groups that made up the sizes of the preschools, while the vertical frequency bar represents the number of preschools that had those numbers