In my presentation I will discuss methodological considerations for studying young learners of English in the context of a doctoral dissertation aiming to provide a more in-depth and multifaceted look into the development learner beliefs in early language teaching. The motivation of the study is a recent educational reform in Finland by which the start of compulsory foreign or second national language teaching was moved from 3rd grade to 1st grade. In this doctoral study, a set of learners are followed during grades 1–3 of primary school. The participants started learning English in fall 2020 at the beginning of first grade, at age 7, with one annual weekly lesson hour of English. The first sub-study, conducted in spring 2021, reported on first-graders (n=38) beliefs regarding the learning of English. The present sub-study, conducted with second-graders (n=21) in spring 2022, focuses on extramural English and learning English outside of the school. It explores how extramural English is portrayed in photographs taken by young learners of English as well as how connections between extramural English and language learning are manifested in the reflections of young learners of English.
This presentation will focus on methods of data collection. Visual methods have been used to explore learners' experiences and beliefs about language (Kalaja & Pitkänen-Huhta, 2020) and can help give voice to participants that may have difficulties in expressing their beliefs through, for example, writing (Kalaja & Melo-Pfeifer, 2019). Group discussions, in turn, present a child-oriented method for engaging in discussion on learning, and may help prompt the elicitation of beliefs with young children. In the present study, data collection comprised photographs taken by the learners and group discussions held a week after. The discussions followed a template that was compiled by taking example of studies by Mård-Miettinen and Björklund (2019) and Nikula and Pitkänen-Huhta (2008).
I will present challenges and advantages of the methods used in this study, as well as present some data examples obtained by using such methods. The experiences gained could be utilized in developing early language teaching pedagogy and as a stepping stone for further development of the European Language Portfolio for young learners.
References
Kalaja, P., & Melo-Pfeifer, S. (2019). Introduction. In P. Kalaja, & S. Melo-Pfeifer (Eds.), Visualising Multilingual Lives: More Than Words (pp. 1–13). Multilingual Matters.
Kalaja, P., & Pitkänen-Huhta, A. (2020). Raising awareness of multilingualism as lived – in the context of teaching English as a foreign language. Language and Intercultural Communication 20(4), 340–355.
Mård-Miettinen, K., & Björklund, S. (2019). "In one sentence there can easily be three languages". A glimpse into the use of languages among immersion students. In A. Huhta, G. Erickson, & N. Figueras (Eds.), Developments in language education, 239–249. EALTA & University of Jyväskylä.
Nikula, T., & Pitkänen-Huhta, A. (2008). Using photographs to access stories of learning English. In P. Kalaja, V. Menezes, & A. M. Barcelos (Eds.), Narratives of Learning and Teaching EFL (pp. 171-185). Palgrave.
