Nature and enactment of tasks for early English as a foreign language teaching (EFLT): a collaborative research project with teachers in Germany

The ethnographic PhD case study is set within a collaborative research project in which teachers and researchers investigate early English as a foreign language (eEFL) tasks. Seven eEFL teachers from five project primary schools (PS) with students aged 6-10 years, in central urban Germany have been followed over a period of five years teaching eEFL in Grades 1-4 with a majority of Grade 4 classes. The research foci lie on: (i) the nature of eEFL tasks based on the academic conceptualisations of tasks and on the teachers' concepts of tasks to meaningfully integrate the theoretical and practical perspective; (ii) and on the teachers' task enactments that have been analysed with a multimodal and Mediated Discourse Analysis approach. The conceptualisation of the research focus poses the investigation of eEFL tasks at the centre of texts, accounts and discursive practices. This draws on the idea that social realities are constructed, insight is context-bound and views discourse as social action in which meaning is produced in interaction. Such an interdiscursive conceptualisation asks for an interdiscursive approach drawing on different data types (e.g., interviews, video recordings, observation protocols) being analysed with different methods. Results show that for eEFL tasks a strong emphasis on the students' personal interests may be beneficial to allow the young learners to experience English as a means of communication. It was found that the teachers used basic and elaborate task formats with a focus on role-plays, interviews, poster presentations or story reconstructions.Moreover, the results suggest that the often described difference between a task-as-workplan and task-as-action is also true for the eEFL classroom. Further, it can be assumed that eEFL tasks can emerge within a certain interplay of four key teaching practices of teachers:'doing school', 'providing space for learners to communicate', 'building a vocabulary' and 'teaching the spoken language'.