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20230721T101520230721T1800Europe/Amsterdam[SYMP53] New insights into early language learningHybrid Session (onsite/online)AILA 2023 - 20th Anniversary Congress Lyon Editioncellule.congres@ens-lyon.fr
Εxploring the effect of music and rhymed stories on second language acquisition: The case of Greek as L2 in the US
Oral Presentation[SYMP53] New insights into early language learning10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
The present study is situated within the field of Early Language Learning and aims to examine the impact of participatory approaches and multimodal methods of teaching on young learners' L2 acquisition. Over the past three decades researchers' interest in the teaching of Greek as L2 has increased significantly. This is partly due to the increasing number of non-Greek speaking refugees who have entered the Greek schools since 2015 but also to the new migratory movement of young Greeks who, due to the economic crisis in Greece, are moving abroad looking for either employment or studies related to their professional field. There is a wide variability in the provision of Greek as a foreign language instruction around the globe and this variability is dependent on the economic and political situation of each country as well as on the different educational systems and values that each country stands for. Given the dearth of appropriate materials for the teaching of Greek as L2 to young learners, the study aims to present innovative material for the teaching of Greek as L2 to early primary school learners (aged 5-6). The study took place in an American-Greek K-12 state school in Delaware, USA, founded by Greek-Americans in 2006. The school's current student population is around 2,000 students of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds, most of them English native speakers. In order to address the need for appropriate materials for the teaching of Greek as L2 to young learners, we designed multimodal material that has a robust pedagogical and linguistic foundation and takes into account (a) the characteristics that young learners bring with them into the classroom, and (b) how they learn a foreign language. The material adopts a story-based approach and is accompanied with songs and videos aiming to make learning fun, motivating and attractive for young learners. The material promotes a 'learning by doing' approach that encourages students to use their body, gestures, and voice in many different activities and through all that, it aims to develop students' social, cognitive, affective and psycho-motor skills. The material takes into account the plasticity of young learner's brain and the holistic way in which they approach the language. This is why the teaching framework adopted is story-based. All stories are followed by game-like activities which aim to provide language practice and develop young learners' cognitive skills (inferencing, inductive thinking, etc.). All stories are either rhyming or musical ones and are supported with both a video and an audio. Music has a predominant role in the design of this material because research findings have shown multiple benefits of its use in foreign language learning at this age (e.g. Fonseca, 2000). Our presentation is going to be supported with video excerpts showcasing the use of the specific material and pedagogical practices in young learners' classes. References Fonseca Mora, C. (2000). Foreign language acquisition and melody singing. ELT Journal, 54(2), 146-152. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/54.2.146
Presenters Marina Mattheoudakis Professor, Aristotle University Of Thessaloniki Co-authors
Primary Senior Students as Agents for Collaborative School ELL: Transforming Learning into Teaching
Oral Presentation[SYMP53] New insights into early language learning10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
This research investigates how primary senior students (6th-graders) reflect their learning at the time of their 1st-grade learning and how they develop their active learning in a project-based learning where they teach English to the present 1st-year students based on what they learned five years ago. If their first year of learning of English at primary school is a happy and motivating one and stays in the learners' mind even up to the last year learning, it is assumed that this unforgettable learning is worth being transmitted to their lower-grade students. Five years ago, the present 6th-grade students learned English with a picturebook "The big turnip," where they listened to reading-aloud of the picturebook and learned vocabulary, expressions, and the animals' cries in the book. They are going to graduate from primary school in March 2023 and have an opportunity to transform their learning five years ago to teaching the present 1st-grade students by using the same picturebook. They are expected to read it aloud and teach vocabulary and expressions to the 1st-year students by taking a role of a teacher in a collaborative way. In the course of this project-based learning to teach what they learned to lower graders, they are going to write a journal that records what they feel, observe, and find out. By analyzing their journal, it will be revealed what they will have learned through the project. This is also going to be an opportunity to review what they will have learned by the time of graduating from primary school. This research guides early language learners to grow into a learner responsible for their own learning and an active and social learner-teacher to create a collaborative learning environment in school early language learning (ELL). Education in Japan has been shifting evaluation to be more learner-centered and emphasize active learning, which is expressed as a fixed phrase "proactive, dialogic/interactive, and deep learning" in the Course of Study (MEXT, 2018). Under this Couse of Study for primary school that has been implemented since April, 2020, ELL started at primary school as a school subject (two 45-minute classes per week) for the grades 5th and 6th. Prior to this, ELL was conducted as a form of "foreign language activities (one 45-minute class per week)", not as a school subject, for 9 years from the 2011 to 2019 academic year. During this transition to a school subject, a nation-wide preparatory practical research projects had been conducted from the 2014 to 2017 academic year. One of the primary schools that participated in the research projects is a school in this research and provided a short version of foreign language activities (one 23-minute class per week) to the 1st-grade students and used a picturebook "The big turnip."
Bibliography Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. (2018). Shougakkou gakusyuu shidou youryou [Course of study for elementary schools]. Tokyo.
The impact of teachers´ language attitudes on early language teaching practice
Oral Presentation[SYMP53] New insights into early language learning10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
The context of this article is the language education in Finnish and Swedish-speaking schools; more specifically the early language education. We present a qualitative investigation which was conducted as a part of the project Multilingual Didactics and Dialogs (DIDIA) at University of Helsinki in Finland. The teachers' beliefs affect their choices of actions and classroom activities, and are influenced by ideologies, language policy orientations as well as the teachers' own perceptions about teaching and learning (see Alisaari et al. 2019, 49). We focus on early language teaching practises in Finnish primary schools and analyse the relationship between teachers' attitudes towards language education and multilingualism (see Tarnanen & Palviainen, 2018). We aim to identify the teachers' views on language and language teaching behind their teaching practises in early language education and pose the following research questions: 1. What do the teachers emphasize or take into account in their planning of the early language education? and 2. How is the teachers view on multilingualism reflected in early language education? Through interviews we aim to create an understanding of which challenges and possibilities teachers see in their daily work in Finnish, Swedish and foreign language teaching. The data was collected by using a questionnaire (N=18) and interviews (N=3) of practicing teachers. In the analysis of the interviews, we followed the principles of content-based data analysis. The results give an insight to the practises in early language teaching. Overall, from the teachers interviews, a picture from early language education as a communicative language education can be drawn and the sociocultural change can be identified when the teachers describe their teaching practices. There is a wish for a broader language reserve in Finland, the early language teaching should not focus on English, but either on the national languages Finnish and Swedish or another foreign language. The analysis of the interviews revealed that the teacher felt comfortable with bilingual teaching practises, but not with multilingual teaching practises. The teachers' attitudes towards multilingualism in the classrooms were somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, the teachers seem to possess a positive attitude towards multilingualism, on the other hand they see the variety of the students' linguistic repertoires as a challenge in their daily practices. They seem to need as well understanding as concrete tools in facilitating understanding and communication with students with little skills in Swedish or Finnish, the target language or the language of instruction. This indicates that there is a clear need for further training targeted to promoting multilingual didactics. We argue, however, that there is also a need for new thinking and new ways of understanding the linguistic practises (see Wei 2018, 10).
Alisaari, J., Heikkola, L., Commins, N., & Emmanuel, O. (2019). Monolingual Ideologies Confronting Multilingual Realities. Finnish Teachers' Beliefs About Linguistic Diversity. Teaching and teacher education 80: 48–58. Web. Tarnanen, M., & Palviainen, Å. (2018). Finnish Teachers as Policy Agents in a Changing Society. Language and education 32(5): 428–443. Web. Wei, Li. (2018). Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language. Applied Linguistics 2018: 39(1): 9–30. doi:10.1093/applin/amx039
Presenters Kirsi Wallinheimo University Lecturer, University Of Helsinki Co-authors
Researching the role of digital media and materials in early language learning
Oral Presentation[SYMP53] New insights into early language learning10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
See abstract below.
This talk presents the results of the first task cycle of the action research project 'EMMa'. The study explores the opportunities and challenges of communicative and interactive approaches to learning and teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in digital learning environments in the young language learners classroom. Digitalisation remains to be one of the hot and much debated topics in these days and continues to receive a significant amount of attention in teaching and learning foreign languages (Luetge & Merse 2021). Already young learners need both - foreign language skills and media competences - to participate in the digitalised global discourse. Thereby, digital media and materials are of great interest, but equally noteworthy are the teaching scenarios in which they are implemented. Appropriate classroom tasks and activities are needed to fully exploit the learning potential of digital media and materials. Nevertheless, research is still scare on how to best implement and use digital media and materials to develop beginners' foreign language and media competences. Tasks and activities need to developed and undergo empirical verification. The action research (Burns 2010) project 'EMMa' investigates how tasks and activities may structure, guide and support the development of foreign language competences in digital learning environments. Over a period of five months different data (lessons video recordings, students' products, questionnaires) was gathered in a German primary EFL classroom to provide evidence-based insights into digitally supported EFL lessons. The data were analysed using Qualitative Content Analysis (Mayring & Fenzl, 2019) and the Critical Incident Technique (Gruenewald 2012) to determine how digital materials and media can be used communicatively and in a way that supports foreign language learning and teaching processes. From these outcomes consequences – for further research as well as communicative and interactive approaches to learning and teaching foreign languages – will be presented and discussed.
Bibliography Burns, Anne (2010): Doing Action Research in English Language Teaching. A Guide for Practitioners. New York: Routledge. Gruenewald, Andreas (2012): Foerderung interkultureller Kompetenz durch Lernaufgaben. In: FLUL. 41/1. P. 54-71. Luetge, Christiane / Merse, Thorsten (eds.) (2021): Digital Teaching and Learning: Perspectives for English Language Education. Tuebingen: Narr. Mayring, Philipp / Fenzl, Thomas (2019): Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse. In: Baur, Nina / Blasius, Joerg (eds.): Handbuch Methoden der empirischen Sozialforschung. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. P. 633-647.
Vocabulary teaching in Finnish early foreign language learning: A textbook analysis
Oral Presentation[SYMP53] New insights into early language learning10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
This study examines early foreign language teaching materials in Finland, in particular how they present and practice vocabulary. Vocabulary learning in early language learning is an understudied topic since most research has concentrated on learning results (Butler, 2015) or learners' perceptions (Mäntylä et al., 2022).
Although early foreign language teaching has become a Europe-wide trend, it is still a recent phenomenon in Finland. As of 2020, all Finnish pupils start studying their first foreign language in the first grade, at the age of seven. Even though in most cases (over 90%) the language is English, it is offered in a variety of languages. Teachers, pupils as well as their guardians have had a very positive attitude towards early language learning (e.g. Mård-Miettinen et al., 2021).
Textbooks are a characterizing feature of Finnish education system and much used in many subjects (Karvonen et al., 2017). Particularly Finnish language education has been very textbook-based (Harjanne et al., 2017). However, in Mård-Miettinen et al.'s (2021) study only 36 percent of teachers (N=550) used a textbook in early language teaching.
We examined five different textbooks used in Finland for early foreign language teaching. The languages covered were English, French, German, Swedish and Spanish. We analysed how the textbooks presented vocabulary using Thornbury's (2004) classification as a basis. In particular, we looked at how the books took into account pupils' existing linguistic resources, how they introduced and attempted to consolidate new vocabulary, what aspects of vocabulary knowledge were emphasised, what the role of formulaic sequences was, and if there were differences between the textbooks of different languages.
The results showed that the materials were rather similar to each other in terms of vocabulary learning. Even though the materials had versatile exercises, there was a lack of progression and consolidating tasks. Moreover, it seems the materials do not largely enhance learner agency or translanguaging. Therefore, the textbooks for early language learning in Finland are not fully in line with current understanding of vocabulary learning and language learning in general. In this presentation we elaborate on the findings and discuss the implications of the study for in- and pre-service teacher training as well as for textbook designers.
References: Butler, Y. G. (2015). English language education among young learners in East Asia: A review of current research (2004–2014). Language Teaching, 48(3), 303–342.
Harjanne, P., Díaz Larenas C., & Tella, S. (2017). Foreign-language teaching and studying in Chilean and Finnish classrooms as seen by teachers. Journal of Language and Cultural Education, 5(3), 1–21.
Karvonen, U., Tainio, L., & Routarinne, S. (2017). Oppia kirjoista: Systemaattinen katsaus suomalaisten perusopetuksen oppimateriaalien tutkimukseen. Kasvatus & Aika, 11(4), 39–57.
Mård-Miettinen, K., Huhta, A., Reini, A., & Stylman, A. (2021). A1-englanti perusopetuksen vuosiluokilla 1–6. Finnish National Agency for Education.
Mäntylä K., Roiha A. & Dufva, H. (2022). Investigating young Finnish CLIL pupils' perceptions of foreign language use through visual narratives. Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education.
Thornbury, S. (2004). How to teach vocabulary. Pearson.
Extensive Reading Interventions for Young EFL Learners in a Greek Primary Education Context
Oral Presentation[SYMP53] New insights into early language learning10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
Extensive reading (ER) aims to make covering large amounts of reading material enjoyable and thus help students become independent and confident readers (Day & Bamford, 1998; Nguyen, 2019). Claims that extensive reading could lead to significant improvements in learners' reading speeds and thus, reading comprehension efficiency date back 40 years (Elley & Mangubhai, 1981). A recent meta-analysis of extensive reading research(Nakanishi, 2015), along with recent articles on ER reinforces the idea that it can prove beneficial for students' L2 reading skills (Suk, 2017; Januarty, 2018). Drawing upon quantitative data, the purpose of this research is to explore the possible benefits of an E.R. project on Year 4 and 5 EFL students (9-10 year-olds) in a Greek Public Primary Education framework. More specifically the study investigates the effects of ER on young learners' general reading competence and their reading comprehension ability. During School Year 2021-22 the students in a School in Thessaloniki were offered a one-hour ER treatment per week: Students have read booklets from two different reading programmes: the " A to Z reading" Series of Readers as well as short stories from the Monkey Pen Series, which are both aimed at native learners. Finally, the students were exposed to authentic Children's Literature material. For the assessment of learners' overall reading competence two tools have been used: Oral Reading Fluency tests (Hudson et al., 2005) and Reading Age Tests (Toe by Toe Reading Age Test). Cambridge YLE Movers and Flyers Tests have also been administered for the assessment of the participants' reading comprehension. Two groups of EFL learners participated in this research: the experimental group (students exposed to the ER programme) , which consisted of 40 Year 4 and 5 students, and the control group, which consisted of another 40 learners of the same age group from a neighbouring school. The control group did not receive any ER treatment. Pre-tests and post-tests were taken by both cohorts before and after the treatment. The results of the study were very encouraging as they indicate clear advantages for the ER group.
References Day, R.R & Bamford, J (1998). Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Elley, W.B, & Mangubhai,F. (1981). The Impact of a book flood in Fiji Primary schools, Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research and Institute of Education Hudson, R.F., H.B. Lane & P. C. Pullen (2005). Reading fluency assessment and instruction: What, why, and how?, International Reading Association, 702–714. Januarty, R. (2018). Extensive Reading (ER) practices and the development of language fluency. Lingua Cultura, 12(3), 267-272. https://doi.org/10.21512/lc.v12i3.4063 Nakanishi, T. (2015). A meta-analysis of extensive reading research. TESOL Quarterly, 49, 6–37. doi:10.1002/tesq.157
Suk, N. (2017). The effects of extensive reading on reading comprehension, reading rate, and vocabulary acquisition, Reading Research Quarterly, 52(1), 73-89.
A visual journey through the integration of research and practice for teaching Arts in English in primary education
Oral Presentation[SYMP53] New insights into early language learning10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
This proposal stems from an ongoing 3-year research project titled Transforming Arts Education in English in the Valencian Context, which takes place in a multilingual system, where English is introduced from the very first year of Primary Education as a vehicular language usually in Arts & Crafts (75% of Valencian schools). The project is conducted by a mixed research group formed by 3 Arts Education researchers, 2 Language Education researchers and 4 Arts in English primary teachers. Its focus is on teacher training and the conceptualisation of the specific relation between Arts and English for Primary Education, and uses a multimodal research methodology, combining action-research methods (Ander-Egg, 2003) with Arts-based methods (Barone & Eisner, 2012) in order to mirror in the research process the dual nature of the object of study. Within this general framework, this presentation will focus on the reflective and formative process that the mixed research team has gone through. One of the practical objectives of the project are four didactic proposals of Arts in English aimed at Primary Education and inspired by four particular pieces of Valencian contemporary art (Consorci de Museus de la Comunitat Valenciana-CMCV, 2018, 2019, 2020), following Artistic Methodologies of Education (Roldán, Marín-Viadel & Rubio Fernández, 2021). These were elaborated by the mixed research team during artistic experimentation and didactisation sessions, then implemented by the four teachers with all their students (around 700 students in total from 6 to 11 y.o.). Before and during the implementation, the mixed research team held joint discussions and reflective practice sessions. All this process was documented through recordings and photographs, yielding verbal and visual data. From all that body of data, images will be selected to create visual pairs (see below for an example) to trigger sessions of visual elicitation (Pauwels, 2015), which will then be contrasted with the verbal data obtained through recordings and observation notes. The research questions guiding the sessions of visual elicitation will be the following: How did the particular research design of the project inform the practice of the teachers? How and where do teachers see the verbal language and their deployment of strategies in the visual data collected from their classroom practice? How do teachers perceive the effects of applying the four didactic proposals in children's learning of English and Arts? This presentation will analyse the results of the visual elicitation sessions and discuss the implications of such results in terms of teacher training and research design.
Avariento, M. (2022) Seeing and drawing through. Visual pair composed of, left, Presenting materials, photograph; and right, Detail. Using materials, photograph. Ander-Egg, E. (2003). Repensando la Investigación-Acción social participativa. Lumen Humanitas.
Barone, T., & Eisner, E. W. (2012). Arts based research. Sage. CMCV. (2018, 2019, 2020). Art contemporani de la Generalitat Valenciana. Primers moments. II & III. València: Institut Valencià de Cultura. Pauwels, L. (2015). Reframing Visual Social Science. Towards a more Visual Sociology and Anthropology. Cambridge University Press. Roldán, J., Marín-Viadel, R., & Rubio Fernández, A. (2021). Metodologías artísticas de enseñanza (MAE) de las artes visuales. In Marín-Viadel et al., La enseñanza de las Artes Visuales en contextos de riesgo de exclusión social. Editorial Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras.
Presenters Anna Marzà Ibàñez Lecturer / Associate Professor In Language Didactics, Universitat Jaume I, Castelló De La Plana
Educational policies and innovations. Presenting the EAN Project in Greece
Oral Presentation[SYMP53] New insights into early language learning10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
According to the new educational policy in Greece, the introduction of English in preschools is prioritized in line with plurilingualism and multicultural aspects of the classrooms on par with the 21st-century skills development.
The introduction of the English language in Greek preschools has been one of the educational policy innovations for the upgrade of the Greek pre-primary education. The initiative places emphasis on the introduction of English as a means to promote children's multilingual awareness instilling motivation and inspiring love and confidence for language learning. Developing intercultural sensitivity and cultivating respect for diverse children's identity are also considered important in this process. As of September 2021, EFL is introduced in all Greek pre-primary schools through a funded project called EAN. Some of its deliverables include supervising the monitoring the implementation, developing training courses for both EFL and pre-primary teachers and developing materials for children.
In this presentation we will shortly introduce the main and most innovative features of the EAN project in Greece, a national and European funded programme. The EAN project aims to support the introduction of the English language through specially designed educational scenarios and creative activities for preschool children. This is an innovative action taking place in the context of the reforms introduced in the country's education system and the priorities of the educational policy aimed at upgrading this system at all levels of education. The EAN team is an interdisciplinary team consisting of university faculty members, and special teaching staff, technical personnel, researchers, and external collaborators. The main goals of the project are: the design and implementation of the necessary training programme for English language teachers, pre-primary teachers and the school administrators involvedmonitoring and supervising the introduction of the English language in pre-primary schools and the collection of evidence from all the key stakeholders in the implementation of the programmethe development of educational material in order to provide teacher support and,the design of the finalised form of teacher training educational material based on the needs of the participants and utilising the data that will be collected in the process of introducing the English language in pre-primary schools.
The educational strategic design of EAN is based on a top-down and bottom-up approach, actively involving all stakeholders (policymakers, academics, education leaders, teachers, parents and children) in the process. A mixture of qualitative and quantitative methodology has been designed to gather data from all stakeholders for the assessment and evaluation of the programme. A MOOC methodology was used for the training of the EFL and pre-primary teachers. The emphasis on cultivating a 'culture of co-operation' within the local but also intercultural society through EFL can become a paradigm shift towards a more humanistic view of educational practices. In designing educational materials, EFL in pre-primary schools is not treated as a separate or an isolated subject in the Greek curriculum but is integrated in the existing school programme and therefore CLIL educational scenarios are devised for the project. The materials are developed in the form of CLIL educational scenarios often using a puppet that creates the communication need for learning and communicating in English, thus providing context and purpose. The aim is to devise and inspire quality-learning experiences so as to promote children's holistic development in a meaningful way.
Presenters Thomai Alexiou Associate Professor, Aristotle University Of Thessaloniki
Utilizing visual methods and group discussions with young learners: challenges and advantages
Oral Presentation[SYMP53] New insights into early language learning10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
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.
Presenters Karoliina Inha Doctoral Researcher, University Of Jyväskylä, Finland
„Didn't you tell me you wanted to know how children learn foreign languages?“: using initial exposure to an unknown language as a method of eliciting YLs' participation in FL (aptitude) research
Oral Presentation[SYMP53] New insights into early language learning10:15 AM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/21 08:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/21 16:00:00 UTC
Foreign language (FL) aptitude has been defined as a set of cognitive abilities that play a major role in both second and FL learning. (Li, 2022). Apart from MLAT-E(lementary) (Carroll & Sapon, 2002), which has shown good predictive validity in a number of studies conducted in different L1 contexts (Kiss & Nikolov, 2005; Tellier & Roehr-Brackin, 2017), there have been no systematic attempts at designing new measures of FL aptitude of young learners (YLs). Furthermore, when it comes to the methodology of research into FL aptitude of YLs, designing new tasks especially the ones where YLs' perspective is take into account, has not been explored yet. Participatory research with child participants is gaining in popularity among researchers (Kuchah and Pinter, 2020) but involving children as co-researchers in individual differences research, especially aptitude research is novel.
The present study describes the post validation process of a novel aptitude measure for YLs. During the validation process three studies (N=49; N=207, N=209) were conducted in order to establish the final product of the validation: a novel aptitude test. A measure consisting of three tasks was designed using a natural language which was at the same time a new language to the participants. The validation process using only the quantitative approach proved to be faulty due to the fact that it could not explain why certain tasks showed neither internal not external validity despite being age appropriate (e.g. the paired associates task). In addition to this, other tasks like a measure of language analytic ability (LAA) proved to be both internally and externally consistent but showed very low predictivity. The third measure, an auditory alertness (AA) task operationalized as a number learning task, proved to be both internally and externally valid and showed good predictive validity but received a rather unusual classification from the participants. Namely, YLs failed to see the new language in this task considering the fact that the content of the task were only numbers. All these insights show that without the YLs' perspective, which was spontaneously offered during the three validation studies, the final product, the novel aptitude measure, cannot be fully explained nor its validation completed. Therefore, a new study involved both the quantitative and the qualitative approach. In addition to the quantitative approach achieved by analyzing the results of the described aptitude test battery, the qualitative approach was achieved by means of a meta-task interview. The participants, ages 6 & 7, N=50, were asked to say what a specific task was about and what it was exactly that they did in order to achieve the task's goal. Preliminary results indicate a towards a positive correlation between accuracy on different aptitude measures and YLs' ability to verbalize either the linguistic rule they were supposed to extrapolate or the memorization strategy they employed. The results are discussed in light of the emerging (YL) aptitude theory and child participatory research.
Carroll, J. B., & Sapon, S. M. (2002). Modern language aptitude test-Elementary: MLAT-E. Rockville, MD: Second Language Testing Foundation. Kiss, C. & Nikolov, M. (2005). Developing, Piloting, and Validating an Instrument to Measure Young Learners' Aptitude. Language Learning, 55: 99–150. doi:10.1111/j.00238333.2005.00291.x Kuchah, K. & Pinter, A. (2021). Researching Young Language Learners in School Contexts: Setting the Scene. In K. Kuchah i A. Pinter (eds.), Ethical and Methodological Issues in Researching Young Language Learners in School Contexts, 1–26. Bristol: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Li, S. (2022). Explicit and implicit language aptitudes. In Li, S., Hiver, P., i Papi, M. (eds.). The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition and individual differences. New York: Routledge. Tellier, A. & Roehr-Brackin, K., (2017). Raising children's metalinguistic awareness to enhance classroom second language learning. In Garcia Mayo, MDP (eds.) Learning foreign languages in primary school: Research insights, Multilingual Matters. pp. 22- 48.
Presenters Jasenka Čengić Research And Teaching Assistant, University Of Zagreb
Marina Mattheoudakis
Kirsi Wallinheimo
Anna Marzà Ibàñez
Thomai Alexiou
Karoliina Inha
Jasenka Čengić
