Child interaction in the Spanish EFL classroom: some findings from research

Although the early learning of English in school settings has grown tremendously in the past twenty years, until recently there has been a clear lack of research-based evidence of what children actually do while interacting in the classroom performing collaborative tasks in a foreign language context. Very often findings from immersion and early bilingual contexts have been extrapolated to foreign language settings, whose characteristics are very different. Evidence from foreign language settings is crucial in order to make decisions about appropriate educational provision, to inform policy makers and to maximize children’s language learning opportunities in low input settings. The talk will illustrate how peer-peer interaction among young learners can clearly be beneficial for their foreign language development and how several implementation variables have an impact on the children’s production. Specific pedagogical implications, potentially transferable to other language learning contexts, will be highlighted and a call will be made for teacher-researcher collaboration on different topics.

María del Pilar García Mayo is Professor of English Philology at the University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU). She holds a degree in English Philology (University of Santiago de Compostela), a Master's degree in Linguistics and TESOL and a PhD in Linguistics (The University of Iowa). She is head of the Language and Speech Research Group of Excellence (www.laslab.org), funded by the Basque Government, director of the Master's programme Language Acquisition in Multilingual Settings and editor of the journal Language Teaching Research (Q1, Sage). Her research focuses on the acquisition of English as a second or third language from generative and cognitive interactionist perspectives.