Teaching foreign languages at the pre-primary level in a monolingual setting: the case of Poland
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30827/portalin.vi.26218Keywords:
pre-primary education, foreign language, language acquisition, pedagogy, ecologyAbstract
In Poland, teaching a foreign language to very young children, i.e. aged 6 and below, has had a relatively long tradition in both educational services and research, which grew out of strong parental aspirations for their children’s educational, and consequently vocational, achievements in the globalized job market.
The goals of the paper are twofold: firstly, it aims to outline the evolution of research directions in language teaching methodology to very young learners (i.e. below 6) over the last three decades. In this respect three major strands are distinguished, i.e. the language acquisition approach, the pedagogical approach and the ecological approach. Secondly, Polish research in pre-primary education is going to be outlined against the backdrop of these major trends in applied linguistics. It is believed that some of the findings may bear relevance to other contexts in which very early teaching of foreign languages is being implemented.
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