Category-Bound Rights and Obligations of Young EFL Learners in Denmark: The Case of (Extreme) Differentiation

Abstract

This study investigates if and how primary school teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) to young learners in Denmark interact in everyday classroom interaction with students who -according to a receptive vocabulary test -differ vastly in their English skills. Using Conversation Analysis, the study looks at how students present themselves in terms of claimed and demonstrated proficiency, epistemic displays, and willingness to participate, and at teachers' methods to engage in interactions with these children, for example when they select them as next speakers. The analysis focuses on how the categories "strong" and "weak student" are co-constructed by both the teacher, the student in question, and their classmates. It seems that membership in one of these groups is written in stone, as students are not given many opportunities to be reassessed, even though continuous assessment is a prerequisite for successful differentiation. The analysis of EFL teachers' practices of doing differentiation in teaching-in-interaction of Young Learners of EFL in Denmark contributes to our understanding of differentiation in language classrooms.

English learning motivation of young learners in Danish primary schools

“…Additionally, the study suggests that EFL teachers of Danish children as young as 7 to 11 years, are increasingly facing the challenge of differentiation between students with higher and lower EFL proficiency within the same class. Possible ways of differentiating in Danish EFL-classrooms have been described by aus der Wieschen (2018). Finally, the results must be interpreted with the following limitations.…”

Emic perspectives on young Danish learners’ foreign language classroom anxiety

“…This is in line with the findings of Horwitz (1986) who found the lack of understanding teacher talk in the FL can be an important source of FLCA. This can be explained by the teaching practice followed by many Danish EFL teachers speaking, including giving instructions, exclusively or mainly in the FL in the class (aus der Wieschen, 2018; aus der Wieschen & Sert, 2018). Similar findings were reported by Macaro and Lee (2013) on 12-year-old Korean EFL learners.…”

“…Danish children often meet people from other nationalities because Denmark is a multicultural society (Statistics Denmark, 2016). Therefore, differentiation is frequently used by EFL teachers in Danish primary-school classrooms (aus der Wieschen, 2018). Several teachers try to follow an L2-only policy, which is successful when accompanied by gesture and multilingual meaning-making practices (aus der Wieschen & Sert, 2018) and sometimes less successful when the teacher involuntarily switches to the first language (L1) with weaker students (aus der Wieschen, 2018).…”