Inquiry on EFL Teaching Methods in a Multilingual Context: A Comparative Focus on the Productive 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 languagesthrough fundamentally different methods remains debated within second languageacquisition research. This thesis addresses this question from the productive side ofEnglish as a Foreign Language instruction—speaking and writing—forming thecomplementary half of a two-part research project: a parallel thesis, conducted jointlywith a research partner using the same fieldwork, examines the receptive skills,reading and listening. Drawing on 13 classroom observations across seven teachers,together with semi-structured interviews, conducted in Brussels, this study comparesthe approach to speaking and writing taken by teachers working with young beginnersin a European School with that of teachers working with adult beginners in a PromotionSociale establishment. Rather than confirming a clean split between age groups, thefieldwork revealed that the same core teaching methods frequently recurred in bothsettings; what changed with age was less which method a teacher reached for thanhow tightly, or how loosely, it was applied once chosen. No comparable divide heldacross materials, task design, or the handling of learners’ errors, where the observationdesign proved unable to separate a genuine age difference from an artefact of unequalobservation time. When asked directly to account for their method choices, teachersrarely pointed to age itself, describing instead what their students needed explained orhow much detail they expected, a pattern consistent with age shaping instructionindirectly, through the learning objective it sets, though this corpus cannot fullyseparate that account from a direct effect of age. A further finding emerged outside thestudy’s initial framework: because no first language was shared widely enough in thechild classrooms to serve as a fallback, those learners were structurally required tosustain English production in a way the adults, who could retreat to French, were not.