Abstract
The chapter explores Hungarian preschool children’s and their teachers’ language use and meaning-making patterns in a context where English is a foreign language. It also seeks to provide a critical analysis of the discrepancy between teachers’ beliefs and practices in the examined contexts. Data collected through ethnographic processes reveal a mismatch between young learners’ needs and teacher preparation. In most cases, teachers struggle to match the target language input to children’s language level, and rely on translation as a systematic strategy for clarifying meaning. Data also show how a teacher’s self-exploration and reflection shape her cognition and practice in the preschool EFL setting. The study has implications for teacher education programmes in the observed context: it calls for a re-examination of professional training in order to address preschool foreign language teachers’ professional needs.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Marianne Nikolov for her comments on an earlier draft of this paper. My thanks also go to Virág Bátri and Barbara Samu for allowing me to rely on the primary data they collected, their final theses, and our shared discussions for the purposes of this analysis.
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Lugossy, R. (2018). Whose Challenge Is It? Learners and Teachers of English in Hungarian Preschool Contexts. In: Schwartz, M. (eds) Preschool Bilingual Education. Multilingual Education, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77228-8_4
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