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Language Teaching for Young Learners: Online-First Articles

Fostering primary students’ competences for democratic culture in EFL

The PEACE project

| Tokyo Gakugei UniversityJapan
| Karlsruhe University of EducationGermany
The PEACE project was a teaching unit which was designed, implemented and evaluated in two primary school classes in Japan and Germany respectively. The project was carried out in an asynchronous virtual exchange format between the two classes. The Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture was used as a basis for the teaching unit, with the framework’s descriptors for young learners serving as tools for designing and assessing both the teaching unit and its outcomes in the form of the participating students’ products and utterances. Using the NVivo coding software for content analysis, the study investigated the deployment of the various areas of competence by the students during the teaching unit and compared these across the classes. This was done to gain insights into both the context-dependency of the deployment of competences for democratic culture as well as the practicability and potentials of carrying out a bilateral asynchronous virtual exchange aiming to promote competences for democratic culture in young learners.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Importance of cultivating intercultural competence/citizenship in primary EFL
    • 2.2The RFCDC as a theoretical framework and its implementation in EFL
  • 3.Research design
    • 3.1Research questions
    • 3.2Participants
    • 3.3Lesson planning
    • 3.4Data collection
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Lessons 1 and 2: My suitcase and letter exchange
    • 4.2Lesson 3: Role-play to imagine the feelings of the characters in The suitcase
    • 4.3Lesson 4: Making paper crafts with messages in Japan and planning a friendship party in Germany
    • 4.4Lessons 5 and 6: Reading the day war came in Japan and engaging with a refugee child in Germany
    • 4.5Lesson 7: Making peace posters and exchanging perceptions of peace
  • 5.Data analysis and results
    • 5.1Analyzing the overall data using the RFCDC as a framework
    • 5.2The values and challenges of applying the RFCDC (research question 3)
  • 6.Discussion and conclusions
  • Note
  • Author queries
  • References
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References (26)
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