PARENTS’ AND TEACHERS’ ATTITUDES TOWARDS EARLY FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING

PARENTS’ AND TEACHERS’ ATTITUDES TOWARDS EARLY FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING

Dagarin Fojkar, Mateja
Pižorn, Karmen

It has already been indicated that parents have a significant impact on their children’s learning of a foreign language (among others,Desforges and Abouchaar, 2003, Gardner, 1985; Lindgren &Muňoz, 2013; MihaljevićDjigunović, 2009; and Xuesong, 2006). The main aim of the present study was to research and compare parents’ and teachers’ attitudes towards children learning a foreign language in the first three years of formal education (ages 6–8). Within the scope of the study, we investigated some further issues, including children’s attitudes to foreign language learning, materials used in teaching a foreign language to children and similar. The study included the main stakeholders in early foreign language learning: parents, teachers and pupils. The data were collected from a sample of 150 parents whose children attended preschools and 263 parents whose children had just finished Year 3 of primary education (age 8) in Slovenia (a total of 413 parents); 104 teachers who teach English to children in the lower grades of primary school; 58 primary school children (age 6–8) who already had experience in early foreign language learning and 62 primary school pupils (age 6–8) who did not yet have such experience. Questionnaires were administered to all of the participants in the study (i.e., parents, teachers and primary school pupils). The findings from the study confirm that parents believe that foreign language learning is important. This is especially true of parents who have themselves learnt several foreign languages over a longer period of time. However, the methodology of teaching children is still not sufficiently creative, which suggests that more teacher training in teaching foreign languages to young children is needed. Furthermore, there is a discrepancy betweenparents’ and teachers’ expectations regardingthe level of foreign language proficiency achieved by children, indicating that in the future more will need to be done in educating parents about the nature of foreign language learning among children and the achievements that can be realistically expected. Keywords: young learners, foreign language learning, parent and teacher attitudes

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2014

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