275);
to be committed “to student teacher INQUIRY – into one’s own beliefs and narratives, and into the professional contexts of teaching and learning for which STs [student teachers] are being prepared” (Wright 2010, p. 273; capital letters in original).
As a result, research on teacher development needs:
to subscribe to “a more ecological approach to research on learning to teach” which means to situate learning to teach in school and classrooms.
… [There] are ample opportunities for future research that pursue a thoughtful and critical understanding of how individuals learn to teach. However, … only when all players and landscapes that comprise the learning-to-teach environment are considered in concert will we gain a full appreciation of the inseparable way of relationships that constitutes the learning-to-teach ecosystem. (Wideen et al., 1998, pp. 130, 169, 170);
to take an emic perspective on teacher development processes and investigate “what happens inside the practices of L2 teacher education” (Johnson, 2015, p. 515);
to be qualitative in nature to be able to capture the complexity of factors involved in learning to teach:
Empirische Studien in der fremdsprachendidaktischen Lehrerforschung verwenden aufgrund der Komplexität des unterrichtlichen Raums und der individuellen Entwicklungs- und Professionalisierungsprozesse vorwiegend qualitative Forschungsmethoden … und diversifizierte Datenquellen. Oft kommen Interviews … zum Einsatz, mitunter verbunden mit der Erfassung und Kommentierung von Lehrerhandeln, z. B. über Beobachtungen. … Dabei stellt der Aktionsforschungsansatz eine besondere Verzahnung von Lehrerforschung, Kollegialer Unterrichtsentwicklung und Professionalisierungs-prozessen dar. (Abendroth-Timmer, 2017, p. 198)
The set-up of the teacher education project of the study presented here will consider the general principles that have been summarized here: it will be situated in a context that represents the heterogeneity of children in state preschools today; it will focus on the central role of the teacher as the mediator to support language learning; it will be organised as a long-term, collaborative process that does not separate experience and location (in other words, is preschool-based and takes place in situ); it will focus on the principle of reflective practice (which means that teachers learn by both reflecting on good practice teacher models and their own teaching practice) and it will investigate in what way English may best be implemented in teachers’ context of work – the preschool (→ chapter 5).
For the research approach it follows that the so-called ecological approach to research on learning to teach will be the basic defining feature of the study: it tries to capture the complexity of processes both as regards the preschool classroom and teachers’ individual development processes. To live up to this claim the research needs to be conducted as a case study. Research results that have been obtained from a selected group of preschool teachers’ experiences – who work as a team in a preschool that qualifies as a representative sample both in terms of its learners and teachers – have been selected for the meso- and micro level of the case study. It is expected that through this approach the results of the interconnectedness of teacher development, children’s progress in learning and teacher education research may be structured appropriately for readers (→ chapter 6).
After the general principles of teacher education programmes and the resulting research requirements have been discussed, the next chapter reviews existing research studies on language teacher education that specifically address early language learning contexts.
4.2 Research on language teacher education for early language learning
The current state of research on language teacher education for early language learning is disappointing. Publications with a title that suggests early language learning to be relevant for the study presented here often prove to be disappointing as the label young or early language learner does not always refer to the contexts of pre- and primary school children. The recently published handbook article on ‘Teaching Young Language Learners’ by Nikolov and Mihaljevic Djigunovic (2019) is a case in point: they explicitly do not consider the preschool level in their contribution (children below 6 years of age):
By young language learners, we mean that learners fall within the age range between 6 and 14, although we are aware of a growing number of programs for younger children. Lowering the start of English learning to the pre-primary age (below 6 years) is an emerging field of study; however, this age group is beyond the scope of this chapter. (p. 578)
In other words: the field of teaching young language learners is not established but in a state of still emerging. But what research on learning to teach young learners is available?
Wilden and Porsch (2017) reviewed major studies on primary English teacher education in Europe and concluded not very optimistically that
there is a lack of empirical evidence of what constitutes ‘quality’ in teacher education [by referring to the most recent Eurydice report 2012]. … This research gap can be identified in general FL education, but it is especially noteworthy in the area of early FL education as this is a relatively young domain. (p. 7; italics in original)
Wilden and Porsch invited researchers who are currently investigating the professional development of primary English teachers to contribute to this volume. They explicitly say that they “decided to focus on FL education in primary schooling (i.e., approximately from the ages of 6-12 years), rather than the pre-primary sector as well” (p. 7).
The study which will be presented here addresses the area of pre-primary English teacher education which is situated in an inclusive multilingual state preschool with heterogeneous learners. To my knowledge no explicit teacher development studies have been published that educate teachers to teach English for the regular preschool as yet. As has already been critically commented in the previous chapter 4.1, empirical studies that are set in preschool contexts were exclusively conducted in bilingual immersive elementary contexts (Piske et al., 2016; Seifert, 2016). These contexts of practice do not represent learning and working conditions of regular state preschool contexts and therefore do not qualify as contexts of practice that mirror the growing heterogeneity of learners neither as regards their cultural backgrounds nor their home languages (cf. Legutke & Schart, 2016, p. 9). Therefore, the multilingual inclusive state preschool is the focus of the preschool teacher education study that will be presented here. Results from publications that are situated in more privileged preschool contexts (for example in preschools that organise learning in small groups of predominantly monolingual children or in preschools that offer extra language classes by qualified extra staff that parents pay for) can therefore not be directly transferred.
A second recently published volume on early language teacher education (Zein & Garton, 2019) was motivated by the editors’ “shared concern that teachers in many school contexts worldwide still struggle to meet the demands of early language pedagogy” (p. 3). Zein and Garton notice “a distinct lack of publications delivering insights into this focal area of interest. Research into teacher education of modern foreign language has been limited” and consequently “the knowledge base of early language teacher education” remains minimal (p. 4). On closer scrutiny the majority of the studies presented in this volume are also situated in primary language teaching and learning contexts (with the exception of one study that is situated in a bilingual CLIL1 kindergarten, that is, in a preschool that integrates content and language learning and therefore research results are not directly transferable to the preschool study presented here.
With these restrictions in mind, the following findings that have contributed to bringing about change in teachers who participated in projects which aimed to develop a language pedagogy for young learners can be summarized from these studies. As can be seen, there is a large overlap of documented experiences to what has been already reported in chapter 4.1;
young learners’ “English language teacher education is often inadequate in preparing teachers for the realities of the primary classroom” (Garton, 2019,