Abstract
The current paper is focused on the diversity in the context of the Croatian EFL primary school teaching and the role of EFL reading in the process of teaching YLs in Grades 1–4. The main aim of the research study was thus to determine what the Croatian teachers’ perception of EFL reading and its early development was, taking into account some of the crucial characteristics of their professional backgrounds. The participants were anonymously administered a questionnaire, comprising 13 items (multiple-choice, open-ended, ranking-based), in order to (dis)confirm five different hypotheses regarding their reading habits, ways in which they encouraged YLs to read more in EFL, and the perception of reading as a language skill along with their ideas of EFL readers. The obtained results reveal that: (1) the participants’ teaching context is mostly heterogeneous; (2) most of them have developed Croatian and English reading habits; (3) most of them (in)directly encourage YLs to read more in EFL, also outside school, through various creative activities; (4) most of them perceive reading as important in their own teaching, and (5) most of them put an emphasis on comprehension and fluency as the products of accomplished reading, generally neglecting the process-oriented strategic component of reading. The study presented here embraces a novel approach to (E)FL reading purely from the teacher’s perspective, both locally and globally.
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Notes
- 1.
Mostly English and German, but also Italian, French and Spanish in some schools.
- 2.
Today, a university degree in early education with a major in English (and German) can be only obtained from the Faculty of Teacher Education, University of Zagreb.
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Šamo, R., Đurić, M.S. (2021). EFL Reading with Young Learners: The Teacher’s Perspective. In: Rokita-Jaśkow, J., Wolanin, A. (eds) Facing Diversity in Child Foreign Language Education. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66022-2_17
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