Editorial: Introduction to the special issue on English language learning in primary schools

Abstract

The early introduction of foreign languages, mainly English, in pre-primary and primary education in different parts of the world is an undisputable fact in today’s world, as clearly illustrated in Enever (2018). One of the reasons for this educational change is the belief in “the earlier the better” notion, which has already been shown not to hold true when linguistic outcomes are assessed in foreign language settings (see García Mayo & García Lecumberri, 2003; Huang, 2015). Age is just one variable among many others that need to be taken into account when assessing child language learning in educational contexts (see Butler, 2019), and that is the reason why more research on identifying those other variables is necessary.

Collaborative writing, written corrective feedback and motivation among child EFL learners

“…However, reformulations seem to offer more opportunities than models for deeper processing (Kim & Bowles 2019) and noticing of language problems (Yang & Zhang, 2010). Research has found that this type of WCF contributes to learners' improvement of their writing, working either individually (Qi & Lapkin, 2001) or on CW tasks (Coyle et al, 2020;García, 2011).…”

“…There is a clear gap in the literature regarding research on the comparison between these two types of WCF, specifically when used by primary school FL learners when they produce a text in collaboration. Reformulations and models have been explored with younger learners in comparison to a control group (Cánovas Guirao, 2011;García, 2011) or comparatively with adults (Hanaoka & Izumi, 2012) but there is a dearth of research comparing these two types of WCF among children (Coyle & Roca de Larios, 2014). In fact, Li and Vuono (2019) call for more studies on the effect of different feedback types on different age groups, especially children.…”