While substantial attention has been given to the introduction of English from the very start of schooling in many European countries today, there remains an insufficient supply of motivated, well-prepared teachers available and willing to meet this demand. This article reviews current mechanisms in Europe aimed at supporting the provision of…

Young learners' use of instructional games in foreign language learning is not yet well understood. Using games that were part of the learning tools for an online assessment, Jido-Eiken, a standardized English proficiency test for young learners in Japan, we examined young learners' game-playing behaviours and the relationship of these…

Few studies investigate ELT with young learners in China, although conservative estimates suggest 60-million primary school children are studying English; even fewer studies investigate Chinese young learners' L2 motivation. This article reports on a study of English learning motivation among Chinese primary school pupils through analysing…

Following the global trend in primary English language instruction, the Ministry of Education in Mexico has recently included English as an additional language as part of the national curriculum for primary grades. Some have questioned whether early EFL programmes can work, given the few instructional hours per week and limited exposure to the…

The purpose of this article is to present one significant part of a large-scale critical-ethnographic-action-research project (CEAR Project) carried out in Oaxaca, Mexico. The overall CEAR Project has been conducted since 2007 in different Oaxacan elementary schools serving indigenous and mestizo (mixed-race) children. In the CEAR Project, teacher…

The purpose of this article is to highlight and discuss the strategies used to diffuse and manage a primary ELT innovation in Greece, strategies that proved essential for developing stakeholders' acceptance and ownership of the innovation, thereby facilitating its further development and sustainability. The PEAP Programme, launched in 2010,…

This article reports on an exploratory study responding to the problem of understanding how young learners position themselves as speakers of a foreign language. A group of 24 Hong Kong primary-school children (ages 10-12) who are in the process of simultaneously learning English and developing narratives of identities as English speakers,…

The purpose of this study is to examine two L2 learning contexts (study abroad versus EFL intensive instruction at home) in terms of language development and learners' characteristics (including students' initial predisposition to learn English and their experience in the programme they enrolled in). Two groups of teenagers were…

The use and appropriate amount of students' own language (OL) in foreign language classes remains a subject of debate. While exclusive new language (NL) use may not necessarily always benefit all learners, especially young language learners (YLLs), overuse of the students' OL may not provide the same range of communicative experiences as…

This article describes a transcription task cycle that was designed to facilitate the development of skills for the IELTS (International English Language Testing System) speaking test at a language school in Japan. The cycle involved practice test, transcription, student correction, teacher correction, and retrial of the original test and…

Out-of-class study time is essential in students' language learning, but few studies in ELT measure out-of-class study time or investigate how teachers can encourage, rather than demand it. In Japan, out-of-class study time is lower than might be expected, ranging from zero to an hour per week. This study therefore sets out to establish those…

The Storyline approach is little known in language teaching contexts although it has much in common with task-based education. Learners play the parts of characters in an unfolding narrative, collaborating on tasks in small groups, a method which combines the use of language skills with practical work. A word often used by participants in a…

Posters, either as promotions by various ELT publishing houses or prepared by ELT teachers and students, are widely used on the walls of many foreign language classrooms. Many of them consist of colourful pictures along with L2 vocabulary, grammar, and texts in order to contribute to the foreign language learning process. However, many ELT…

This paper introduces a new vowel notation system aimed at aiding the teaching of English pronunciation. This notation system, designed as an enhancement to orthographic text, was designed to use concepts borrowed from the representation of musical notes and is also linked to the acoustic characteristics of vowel sounds. Vowel timbre is…

This study utilizes a pre-test/post-test assessment to investigate the instructional efficacy of a genre-based approach to teaching summary writing. Forty-one EFL university students in Taiwan were asked before and after the instruction to summarize a simplified version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in a maximum of 500 words. All the students'…