This study explored the extent to which 6 groups of primary school L2 students (n = 120) from Chile benefitted from viewing 11 captioned episodes of an animated cartoon in vocabulary learning at the level of written word form recall (dictation). The pretest-posttest research design compared the outcomes of the experimental groups that differed in year level and viewing distribution (year 4 = 1–4 episodes a week; year 5 = 2 or 4 episodes a week). The results revealed learners’ significant gains at posttest, especially in the case of fifth graders, and greater influence of viewing distribution on fourth graders. Specifically, a shorter distance between episodes appeared to enhance the recall of written word forms. The group interviews conducted with sample participants provided rich data on the beneficial effects of multimodality to compensate for knowledge gaps.

This study deals with how teachers make use of their L1 in primary English classrooms in Germany. The database for the analysis consists of 24 lesson transcripts from grades 3 and 4 which were taken from the Primary English Classroom Corpus (PECC) (Limberg, 2019). The analysis first focuses on the frequency of teachers’ L1 use in the data corpus and then takes a qualitative, CA-oriented perspective on four selected cases to describe the organisation of codeswitching and the consequences which the L1 use potentially has for the ongoing interaction with the learners. Conclusions are drawn on the importance of discussing language use and classroom discourse in primary English teacher education.

This paper adopts a conversation-analytic (CA) approach to analyze L2 English (L2E) phonics instruction in a primary school setting. Specifically, it argues that the identification of interactional sequences that create learning opportunities can provide valuable insights that ultimately inform teachers’ pedagogical practices (Sert, 2021). Focusing on the teaching of split digraphs via the Magic E analogy in a German 3rd grade primary classroom, the analysis shows that phonics teaching, originally developed for L1 English literacy instruction, can raise phonographic awareness and lay the foundation for literacy skills in L2E by fostering the acquisition of sound-letter relationships, as illustrated by the learners’ competence gains elicited through read-aloud tests. Implications for phonics-based teaching of English in primary contexts are discussed.

Specific cognitive and linguistic factors have been shown to underpin second language (L2) spelling attainment across different alphabetic orthographies. While previous studies into young English language learners’ (YELLs) literacy development have focused predominantly on reading skills, empirical findings on L2 spelling are scarce. The present study investigated how cognitive and linguistic factors as well as reading skills affect L2 English spelling performance in YELLs from a first language (L1) German background (n = 75). Multiple regression analyses and a mediation model revealed that L2 reading comprehension and L2 reading accuracy predicted learners’ L2 spelling outcomes. Learners’ cognitive and linguistic abilities did not predict spelling directly, whereas phonological awareness and L2 grammar had predictive effects on spelling mediated by L2 reading comprehension and reading accuracy.

The present study investigates how primary school children whose first language of literacy is German acquire vowel spelling in French as a second writing system. The paper distinguishes the children’s vowel spelling in three vowel groups: vowels that are phonologically and graphematically identical in French and German; vowels that are phonologically but not graphematically identical in both languages; and vowels that exist only in French. In this longitudinal study, we used dictations to collect French vowel spellings from students in Grade 2 to Grade 4 in a bilingual school in Germany. The results indicate that the influence of the first writing system is largest at the beginning of the acquisition process for all vowel spellings and that children tend to spell French vowels differently depending on the phonological and graphematic similarities and differences between German and French. The results are discussed in the framework of spelling research in biliterate contexts as well as in the educational context of primary school.

The present study investigates the writing strategies which 22 nine-to-ten-year-old learners reported having employed after producing an explanatory text in L2 English as part of a CLIL science project with embedded literacy instruction. Pre-writing and stimulated recall interviews were used to elicit information on the learners’ thinking about their writing, which was coded using categories (e.g., retrieval, restructuring) drawn from the research literature (e.g., Macaro, 2007). The results revealed that children’s writing strategies were influenced by individual, task-related, and contextual factors. Pedagogical implications highlight the importance of raising young learners’ metalinguistic and metacognitive knowledge of L2 writing.

The present study offers insight into speech acts in 18 local and international English language textbooks (six textbook series) used in Croatian primary schools with learners aged 7–10 (years 2–4). More specifically, the analysis is focused on 10 speech acts in Schauer’s (2019) notion of Survival English — linguistic means enabling young learners to deal with (emergency) situations tied to their own real-life contexts. The results indicate that the materials available to young (beginning) Croatian learners of English provide an unbalanced source of input when it comes to these essential speech acts, with several of the speech acts seriously underrepresented in the textbooks. The responsibility thus lies on the teachers to provide access to authentic input relevant to young language learners.

This chapter describes a continuing professional development course (the ICEPro Course) which aimed to empower teachers and learners to become democratic citizens and proffers a case for intercultural citizenship education through picturebooks. The main pedagogical frameworks and models developed for the ICEPro Course — the Picturebook Selection Guide and a template for the teacher made resources (ICEKits) — are presented to establish whether they support practitioners in developing intercultural and citizenship objectives. Using data from the ICEKits, participant evaluation surveys, recordings of teacher presentations and teacher reflections suggest that the pedagogical frameworks, models and modelling are successful. However, implications for teacher education stress the need to provide additional support in the form of mentoring within a sustained professional development experience.

Elementary school teachers in France are responsible for teaching English, but most are not specialists. They need support, particularly for listening comprehension. Hence, we designed Luciole, an English listening comprehension learning game for 6-to-9-year-old French pupils. A first study showed that children who played Luciole developed their listening comprehension in English but, unexpectedly, also improved their phonological awareness in French, even though only about 5% of Luciole’s activities are related to phonology. Based on these results, another study with a bilingual phonological awareness test and a streamlined data collection method was designed to try to replicate the previous results and to explore their origin. The results for listening comprehension were replicated, but not the results for phonological awareness. We provide guidelines for a more reliable phonological awareness test, and we conclude that using digital tools in the classroom can be beneficial for young learners’ listening skills.

This chapter presents the results of a multi-site study that employed the Teacher Input Observation Scheme (TIOS, Kersten et al., 2018) in the context of the primary second language (L2) English practicum to elicit self- and other-assessments of classroom practices from 74 student teachers and their 13 university mentors at three German universities. The four TIOS sub-scales permit a differentiated view on mentor and student perceptions of language teaching strategies to shed light on this crucial phase of pre-service teacher education programmes. ANOVAs showed that student and mentor ratings did not differ systematically, but a significant interaction was found between ratings and universities, hinting at a possible intervening role of academic programs. Linear regression analyses revealed that pedagogic experience negatively predicted ratings, suggesting that both groups’ assessments become stricter with teaching experience. Implications for primary English language teacher education and research are discussed.

This study investigates parents’ perspectives on the preferred onset of English education in Germany and potential explanatory factors drawing on a cross-sectional survey of 2,645 parents from the EUBE project ( Englischunterrichtsbeginn aus Elternsicht / Parental perspectives on the onset of English Language Education). Results reveal that a significant majority of parents advocate for an early start in year 1 or 2 of primary school, generally aligning with their strong conviction of the importance of English, high educational aspirations and expectations, and their own (early) start of language education. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of parental perspectives that have also shown to be related to multiple indicators of educational success in general and achievements in language learning in particular.

Due to changes in teaching and assessment, the transition from primary to secondary school may significantly affect pupils’ proficiency in and their attitudes towards English as a foreign language. This longitudinal study followed 69 pupils moving from bilingual CLIL programmes in primary school to regular English (EFL) lessons in Years 5 to 7. Questionnaire data revealed that these pupils maintained positive attitudes towards both CLIL programmes and EFL lessons. Additionally, 81 secondary school EFL teachers reported that their CLIL pupils continued to outperform peers from non-CLIL programmes in English listening, reading, and speaking skills by Year 7. The results suggest that primary school CLIL programmes may have long-term positive effects when pupils subsequently receive adequate support in secondary school EFL lessons.

This study explored the extent to which 6 groups of primary school L2 students (n = 120) from Chile benefitted from viewing 11 captioned episodes of an animated cartoon in vocabulary learning at the level of written word form recall (dictation). The pretest-posttest research design compared the outcomes of the experimental groups that differed in year level and viewing distribution (year 4 = 1–4 episodes a week; year 5 = 2 or 4 episodes a week). The results revealed learners’ significant gains at posttest, especially in the case of fifth graders, and greater influence of viewing distribution on fourth graders. Specifically, a shorter distance between episodes appeared to enhance the recall of written word forms. The group interviews conducted with sample participants provided rich data on the beneficial effects of multimodality to compensate for knowledge gaps.

This study deals with how teachers make use of their L1 in primary English classrooms in Germany. The database for the analysis consists of 24 lesson transcripts from grades 3 and 4 which were taken from the Primary English Classroom Corpus (PECC) (Limberg, 2019). The analysis first focuses on the frequency of teachers’ L1 use in the data corpus and then takes a qualitative, CA-oriented perspective on four selected cases to describe the organisation of codeswitching and the consequences which the L1 use potentially has for the ongoing interaction with the learners. Conclusions are drawn on the importance of discussing language use and classroom discourse in primary English teacher education.

This paper adopts a conversation-analytic (CA) approach to analyze L2 English (L2E) phonics instruction in a primary school setting. Specifically, it argues that the identification of interactional sequences that create learning opportunities can provide valuable insights that ultimately inform teachers’ pedagogical practices (Sert, 2021). Focusing on the teaching of split digraphs via the Magic E analogy in a German 3rd grade primary classroom, the analysis shows that phonics teaching, originally developed for L1 English literacy instruction, can raise phonographic awareness and lay the foundation for literacy skills in L2E by fostering the acquisition of sound-letter relationships, as illustrated by the learners’ competence gains elicited through read-aloud tests. Implications for phonics-based teaching of English in primary contexts are discussed.

Specific cognitive and linguistic factors have been shown to underpin second language (L2) spelling attainment across different alphabetic orthographies. While previous studies into young English language learners’ (YELLs) literacy development have focused predominantly on reading skills, empirical findings on L2 spelling are scarce. The present study investigated how cognitive and linguistic factors as well as reading skills affect L2 English spelling performance in YELLs from a first language (L1) German background (n = 75). Multiple regression analyses and a mediation model revealed that L2 reading comprehension and L2 reading accuracy predicted learners’ L2 spelling outcomes. Learners’ cognitive and linguistic abilities did not predict spelling directly, whereas phonological awareness and L2 grammar had predictive effects on spelling mediated by L2 reading comprehension and reading accuracy.

The present study investigates how primary school children whose first language of literacy is German acquire vowel spelling in French as a second writing system. The paper distinguishes the children’s vowel spelling in three vowel groups: vowels that are phonologically and graphematically identical in French and German; vowels that are phonologically but not graphematically identical in both languages; and vowels that exist only in French. In this longitudinal study, we used dictations to collect French vowel spellings from students in Grade 2 to Grade 4 in a bilingual school in Germany. The results indicate that the influence of the first writing system is largest at the beginning of the acquisition process for all vowel spellings and that children tend to spell French vowels differently depending on the phonological and graphematic similarities and differences between German and French. The results are discussed in the framework of spelling research in biliterate contexts as well as in the educational context of primary school.

The present study investigates the writing strategies which 22 nine-to-ten-year-old learners reported having employed after producing an explanatory text in L2 English as part of a CLIL science project with embedded literacy instruction. Pre-writing and stimulated recall interviews were used to elicit information on the learners’ thinking about their writing, which was coded using categories (e.g., retrieval, restructuring) drawn from the research literature (e.g., Macaro, 2007). The results revealed that children’s writing strategies were influenced by individual, task-related, and contextual factors. Pedagogical implications highlight the importance of raising young learners’ metalinguistic and metacognitive knowledge of L2 writing.

The present study offers insight into speech acts in 18 local and international English language textbooks (six textbook series) used in Croatian primary schools with learners aged 7–10 (years 2–4). More specifically, the analysis is focused on 10 speech acts in Schauer’s (2019) notion of Survival English — linguistic means enabling young learners to deal with (emergency) situations tied to their own real-life contexts. The results indicate that the materials available to young (beginning) Croatian learners of English provide an unbalanced source of input when it comes to these essential speech acts, with several of the speech acts seriously underrepresented in the textbooks. The responsibility thus lies on the teachers to provide access to authentic input relevant to young language learners.

This chapter describes a continuing professional development course (the ICEPro Course) which aimed to empower teachers and learners to become democratic citizens and proffers a case for intercultural citizenship education through picturebooks. The main pedagogical frameworks and models developed for the ICEPro Course — the Picturebook Selection Guide and a template for the teacher made resources (ICEKits) — are presented to establish whether they support practitioners in developing intercultural and citizenship objectives. Using data from the ICEKits, participant evaluation surveys, recordings of teacher presentations and teacher reflections suggest that the pedagogical frameworks, models and modelling are successful. However, implications for teacher education stress the need to provide additional support in the form of mentoring within a sustained professional development experience.

Elementary school teachers in France are responsible for teaching English, but most are not specialists. They need support, particularly for listening comprehension. Hence, we designed Luciole, an English listening comprehension learning game for 6-to-9-year-old French pupils. A first study showed that children who played Luciole developed their listening comprehension in English but, unexpectedly, also improved their phonological awareness in French, even though only about 5% of Luciole’s activities are related to phonology. Based on these results, another study with a bilingual phonological awareness test and a streamlined data collection method was designed to try to replicate the previous results and to explore their origin. The results for listening comprehension were replicated, but not the results for phonological awareness. We provide guidelines for a more reliable phonological awareness test, and we conclude that using digital tools in the classroom can be beneficial for young learners’ listening skills.

This chapter presents the results of a multi-site study that employed the Teacher Input Observation Scheme (TIOS, Kersten et al., 2018) in the context of the primary second language (L2) English practicum to elicit self- and other-assessments of classroom practices from 74 student teachers and their 13 university mentors at three German universities. The four TIOS sub-scales permit a differentiated view on mentor and student perceptions of language teaching strategies to shed light on this crucial phase of pre-service teacher education programmes. ANOVAs showed that student and mentor ratings did not differ systematically, but a significant interaction was found between ratings and universities, hinting at a possible intervening role of academic programs. Linear regression analyses revealed that pedagogic experience negatively predicted ratings, suggesting that both groups’ assessments become stricter with teaching experience. Implications for primary English language teacher education and research are discussed.

This study investigates parents’ perspectives on the preferred onset of English education in Germany and potential explanatory factors drawing on a cross-sectional survey of 2,645 parents from the EUBE project ( Englischunterrichtsbeginn aus Elternsicht / Parental perspectives on the onset of English Language Education). Results reveal that a significant majority of parents advocate for an early start in year 1 or 2 of primary school, generally aligning with their strong conviction of the importance of English, high educational aspirations and expectations, and their own (early) start of language education. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of parental perspectives that have also shown to be related to multiple indicators of educational success in general and achievements in language learning in particular.

Due to changes in teaching and assessment, the transition from primary to secondary school may significantly affect pupils’ proficiency in and their attitudes towards English as a foreign language. This longitudinal study followed 69 pupils moving from bilingual CLIL programmes in primary school to regular English (EFL) lessons in Years 5 to 7. Questionnaire data revealed that these pupils maintained positive attitudes towards both CLIL programmes and EFL lessons. Additionally, 81 secondary school EFL teachers reported that their CLIL pupils continued to outperform peers from non-CLIL programmes in English listening, reading, and speaking skills by Year 7. The results suggest that primary school CLIL programmes may have long-term positive effects when pupils subsequently receive adequate support in secondary school EFL lessons.

This study explored the extent to which 6 groups of primary school L2 students (n = 120) from Chile benefitted from viewing 11 captioned episodes of an animated cartoon in vocabulary learning at the level of written word form recall (dictation). The pretest-posttest research design compared the outcomes of the experimental groups that differed in year level and viewing distribution (year 4 = 1–4 episodes a week; year 5 = 2 or 4 episodes a week). The results revealed learners’ significant gains at posttest, especially in the case of fifth graders, and greater influence of viewing distribution on fourth graders. Specifically, a shorter distance between episodes appeared to enhance the recall of written word forms. The group interviews conducted with sample participants provided rich data on the beneficial effects of multimodality to compensate for knowledge gaps.

This study deals with how teachers make use of their L1 in primary English classrooms in Germany. The database for the analysis consists of 24 lesson transcripts from grades 3 and 4 which were taken from the Primary English Classroom Corpus (PECC) (Limberg, 2019). The analysis first focuses on the frequency of teachers’ L1 use in the data corpus and then takes a qualitative, CA-oriented perspective on four selected cases to describe the organisation of codeswitching and the consequences which the L1 use potentially has for the ongoing interaction with the learners. Conclusions are drawn on the importance of discussing language use and classroom discourse in primary English teacher education.

This paper adopts a conversation-analytic (CA) approach to analyze L2 English (L2E) phonics instruction in a primary school setting. Specifically, it argues that the identification of interactional sequences that create learning opportunities can provide valuable insights that ultimately inform teachers’ pedagogical practices (Sert, 2021). Focusing on the teaching of split digraphs via the Magic E analogy in a German 3rd grade primary classroom, the analysis shows that phonics teaching, originally developed for L1 English literacy instruction, can raise phonographic awareness and lay the foundation for literacy skills in L2E by fostering the acquisition of sound-letter relationships, as illustrated by the learners’ competence gains elicited through read-aloud tests. Implications for phonics-based teaching of English in primary contexts are discussed.

Specific cognitive and linguistic factors have been shown to underpin second language (L2) spelling attainment across different alphabetic orthographies. While previous studies into young English language learners’ (YELLs) literacy development have focused predominantly on reading skills, empirical findings on L2 spelling are scarce. The present study investigated how cognitive and linguistic factors as well as reading skills affect L2 English spelling performance in YELLs from a first language (L1) German background (n = 75). Multiple regression analyses and a mediation model revealed that L2 reading comprehension and L2 reading accuracy predicted learners’ L2 spelling outcomes. Learners’ cognitive and linguistic abilities did not predict spelling directly, whereas phonological awareness and L2 grammar had predictive effects on spelling mediated by L2 reading comprehension and reading accuracy.

The present study investigates how primary school children whose first language of literacy is German acquire vowel spelling in French as a second writing system. The paper distinguishes the children’s vowel spelling in three vowel groups: vowels that are phonologically and graphematically identical in French and German; vowels that are phonologically but not graphematically identical in both languages; and vowels that exist only in French. In this longitudinal study, we used dictations to collect French vowel spellings from students in Grade 2 to Grade 4 in a bilingual school in Germany. The results indicate that the influence of the first writing system is largest at the beginning of the acquisition process for all vowel spellings and that children tend to spell French vowels differently depending on the phonological and graphematic similarities and differences between German and French. The results are discussed in the framework of spelling research in biliterate contexts as well as in the educational context of primary school.

The present study investigates the writing strategies which 22 nine-to-ten-year-old learners reported having employed after producing an explanatory text in L2 English as part of a CLIL science project with embedded literacy instruction. Pre-writing and stimulated recall interviews were used to elicit information on the learners’ thinking about their writing, which was coded using categories (e.g., retrieval, restructuring) drawn from the research literature (e.g., Macaro, 2007). The results revealed that children’s writing strategies were influenced by individual, task-related, and contextual factors. Pedagogical implications highlight the importance of raising young learners’ metalinguistic and metacognitive knowledge of L2 writing.

The present study offers insight into speech acts in 18 local and international English language textbooks (six textbook series) used in Croatian primary schools with learners aged 7–10 (years 2–4). More specifically, the analysis is focused on 10 speech acts in Schauer’s (2019) notion of Survival English — linguistic means enabling young learners to deal with (emergency) situations tied to their own real-life contexts. The results indicate that the materials available to young (beginning) Croatian learners of English provide an unbalanced source of input when it comes to these essential speech acts, with several of the speech acts seriously underrepresented in the textbooks. The responsibility thus lies on the teachers to provide access to authentic input relevant to young language learners.

This chapter describes a continuing professional development course (the ICEPro Course) which aimed to empower teachers and learners to become democratic citizens and proffers a case for intercultural citizenship education through picturebooks. The main pedagogical frameworks and models developed for the ICEPro Course — the Picturebook Selection Guide and a template for the teacher made resources (ICEKits) — are presented to establish whether they support practitioners in developing intercultural and citizenship objectives. Using data from the ICEKits, participant evaluation surveys, recordings of teacher presentations and teacher reflections suggest that the pedagogical frameworks, models and modelling are successful. However, implications for teacher education stress the need to provide additional support in the form of mentoring within a sustained professional development experience.

Elementary school teachers in France are responsible for teaching English, but most are not specialists. They need support, particularly for listening comprehension. Hence, we designed Luciole, an English listening comprehension learning game for 6-to-9-year-old French pupils. A first study showed that children who played Luciole developed their listening comprehension in English but, unexpectedly, also improved their phonological awareness in French, even though only about 5% of Luciole’s activities are related to phonology. Based on these results, another study with a bilingual phonological awareness test and a streamlined data collection method was designed to try to replicate the previous results and to explore their origin. The results for listening comprehension were replicated, but not the results for phonological awareness. We provide guidelines for a more reliable phonological awareness test, and we conclude that using digital tools in the classroom can be beneficial for young learners’ listening skills.

This chapter presents the results of a multi-site study that employed the Teacher Input Observation Scheme (TIOS, Kersten et al., 2018) in the context of the primary second language (L2) English practicum to elicit self- and other-assessments of classroom practices from 74 student teachers and their 13 university mentors at three German universities. The four TIOS sub-scales permit a differentiated view on mentor and student perceptions of language teaching strategies to shed light on this crucial phase of pre-service teacher education programmes. ANOVAs showed that student and mentor ratings did not differ systematically, but a significant interaction was found between ratings and universities, hinting at a possible intervening role of academic programs. Linear regression analyses revealed that pedagogic experience negatively predicted ratings, suggesting that both groups’ assessments become stricter with teaching experience. Implications for primary English language teacher education and research are discussed.

This study investigates parents’ perspectives on the preferred onset of English education in Germany and potential explanatory factors drawing on a cross-sectional survey of 2,645 parents from the EUBE project ( Englischunterrichtsbeginn aus Elternsicht / Parental perspectives on the onset of English Language Education). Results reveal that a significant majority of parents advocate for an early start in year 1 or 2 of primary school, generally aligning with their strong conviction of the importance of English, high educational aspirations and expectations, and their own (early) start of language education. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of parental perspectives that have also shown to be related to multiple indicators of educational success in general and achievements in language learning in particular.

Due to changes in teaching and assessment, the transition from primary to secondary school may significantly affect pupils’ proficiency in and their attitudes towards English as a foreign language. This longitudinal study followed 69 pupils moving from bilingual CLIL programmes in primary school to regular English (EFL) lessons in Years 5 to 7. Questionnaire data revealed that these pupils maintained positive attitudes towards both CLIL programmes and EFL lessons. Additionally, 81 secondary school EFL teachers reported that their CLIL pupils continued to outperform peers from non-CLIL programmes in English listening, reading, and speaking skills by Year 7. The results suggest that primary school CLIL programmes may have long-term positive effects when pupils subsequently receive adequate support in secondary school EFL lessons.