Abstract:

The Ministry of National Education’s decision in 1997 to implement English language instruction from the 4th grade onward has resulted in the restructuring of teacher education Bachelor of Arts (BA) programs in order to prepare teachers to adapt to this change. Accordingly, courses such as “Teaching Foreign Languages to Young Learners” have been included as part of the foreign language teacher education curriculum. However, to date, the effectiveness of these courses has not been investigated. Hence, employing a series of in-depth interviews with 25 English language teachers, this study proposed to examine the effectiveness of English language teacher education BA programs in preparing teachers to instruct young learners. The results suggest that only 8% of English teachers consider their BA programs to be effective. The strengths noted in these programs include application-based courses, while the fact that these programs do not prepare teachers for classroom practice was cited as their greatest shortcoming. The results also show that graduates of BA programs other than English Language Teaching feel that their certification programs do not prepare them to teach young learners.

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