Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

English in the primary school
The learning of English as a foreign language by the children
of wealthy parents who engaged an English ‘Miss’ is a
tradition as long-standing in Europe and elsewhere as the
importation of a ‘Mademoiselle’ or a ‘Fraulein’ into upper-
class households in Britain. And although this amateurish
Anna-and-the-King-of-Siam type of language teaching to the
young has a long history it was not until the 1950s that the
earlystart movement was established in state primary
schools. In France, Sweden and Holland, independent
experiments with classes of children starting English from
ages between 7 and 9 years old demonstrated that
enthusiastic teachers using oral methods could achieve
excellent results, particularly in pronunciation, with little or
no effort. Large schemes in the 1960s in Germany, France
and Italy (paralleled by the experimental teaching of French
in British primary schools) established in the growing climate
of educational democratisation that success in foreign
language learning need not be limited to the more intelligent
child, though different rates of learning were a fact of
academic life.

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Young Children Learning English
167
The teaching of Foreign Languages in the Elementary
School—the FLES movement, to use the American label—
attracted strong support from the Council of Europe and
flourished in a number of countries during the 1960s. The
economic crisis of the following years, however, had a major
impact on the early teaching of English in state schools: not
only was it felt to be something of an educational luxury, but it
required specialised materials and teacher training. Although a
number of FLES schemes continue to flourish in France,
Germany, Italy and Yugoslavia, among others, major
enterprises have been halted; the French Ministry of Education
has banned further experiments, the ambitious plans to make
Holland a bi-lingual nation by 1980 have been shelved.
But the twenty years of English teaching in foreign state
primary schools must be seen against a much longer
background of English language teaching to young children
in second language situations. In East and West Africa, in
Cyprus and Malaysia, in Fiji and Hong Kong, the long
tradition of teaching English to young children continues.
But primary school English in second language areas was for
long a sectional filter for secondary, English-medium,
education; and was frequently taught by semi-formal
intelligence-bound methods. It was the twenty years of
experimentation, research and enthusiasm of the FLES
movement which gave clearer identity to the aims and
methods appropriate to the primary classroom.