Teaching young learners: The role of theory on practice

Abstract

The current study aims at investigating ELT trainees’ understanding of beliefs about basic theory on teaching English to young learners and how this knowledge affected their teaching philosophy during implementation in the school experience course. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used for data collection. The first group of data is gathered from 179 ELT trainees via a questionnaire, (Cronbach alpha .702) and the second group of data is collected from 27 trainees in the form of a structured interview. The results indicate that the trainees have gained the necessary theoretical information at a moderately high level. The interview results supported that the trainees implemented their beliefs about teaching young learners in most of the areas except for the organization of the resources and the use of appropriate teaching methodology. In other areas such as classroom management, child-adult differences, assessment, and children’s characteristics trainees’ beliefs were justified with their actual classroom practice.

Keywords

• teacher knowledge, trainees’ beliefs, reflective practice, teaching young learners

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