The Rationale for A Proposal for English Language Education: The Experience of Developing A Curriculum to Teach English for Young Learners

Abstract

─Research suggests that young learners have remarkable abilities to learn a second language in a natural way; however, educational institutions around the world have not systematized the learning-teaching process of foreign languages for young learners, and this is also the case of bilingual education in Chile. This paper shows the rationale for developing an original program to teach English as a foreign language for young learners, which has been approved by the Ministry of Education for primary education in a private-subsidized school in Chile. The objective of this project was to systematize English language education from year 1 to year 4 as well as the language teaching methodology to integrate the psycholinguistic aspects of the learning processes of young learners with a focus on the Communicative Language Teaching approach, Semantic Fields (within a lexical approach) and Processability Theory. Finally, an overview of the procedure about the development process of the course will be provided using the theoretical models by Graves (2001) and Jolly Bolitho (1998). Keywords─primary education; English; curriculum; second language instruction; young learners