Inquiry on EFL Teaching Methods: A Comparative Focus on the Receptive Skills in Child and Adult Learners

Details

Supervisors

Van de Vyver, Julie

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en traduction, à finalité didactique

Abstract

enThe question of whether children and adults should be taught foreign languages through fundamentally different methods remains debated within second language acquisition research. Based on classroom observations and teacher interviews conducted in Brussels, this master’s thesis offers a qualitative account of how primary- school and adult EFL teachers approach the two receptive skills, reading and listening. Conducted as one half of a two-part comparative project, whose co-researcher thesis addresses the corresponding productive skills, speaking and writing, using the same fieldwork, this study compares teachers working with young beginners in a European School to teachers working with adult learners in a Promotion Sociale establishment. The observations showed that intensive and extensive methods did not divide as cleanly along age lines as expected: several methods commonly associated with one population turned out to be present, in some form, in the other as well, while age appeared to influence how much support a method required more than whether it could be used at all. The teachers were subsequently interviewed to gather their own account of these choices. One recurring finding was that age and other structural factors, such as a shared first language, were often difficult to disentangle within this corpus, complicating any straightforward attribution of a teacher’s methodological choices to age alone.