Nature and Enactment of Tasks for Early English as a Foreign Language Teaching

This ethnographic case study is set within a collaborative research project in which teachers and researchers investigate early English as a foreign language (eEFL) tasks in five German primary schools. The aim is to explore how eEFL tasks can be defined and enacted in daily classroom practices. Results are obtained through an interpretation of multiple sources with a set of different qualitative analyses within an interdiscursive, multi-perspectived research agenda. Results show that teachers use several task formats and emphasize that topics be personally relevant and meaningful to students. The results suggest that eEFL tasks can emerge during an interplay of four key teaching practices: ‘doing school’, ‘providing space for learners to communicate’, ‘building a vocabulary’ and ‘teaching the spoken language’. Within such a teaching practice teachers can enable their students to use English as a means of communication.

Autor:inneninformation:
Constanze Dreßler war wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Institut für die Didaktik der englischen Sprache und Literatur an der Justus-Liebig-Universität. Sie hat danach ihr zweites Staatsexamen für das Lehramt an Grundschule abgelegt und arbeitet nun als Grundschullehrerin.