Teaching EFL at Spanish Preschools: A comparative analysis from two different teachers’ perspectives

Abstract

Beginning to learn a foreign language at a very early age (i.e., preschool) is a bourgeoning reality across Europe, following the EU recommendations. However, as different European reports state, there is a lack of concrete guidelines on how to address this age group. So, given the necessity to define adequate practices to make this learning successful, we conducted a Delphi project to reach consensus among different types of experts (n=99) on these practices (Andúgar, 2017; Andúgar & Cortina-Pérez, 2018; Andúgar, Cortina-Pérez & Tornel, 2019, 2020). The present paper emerges from the data obtained in this project and comparatively analyses the two most relevant participants’ profiles: the EFL specialist teacher (n=29) and the Pre-primary practitioner (n=27) within the Spanish context. We compared their results about the category teaching methodology through the nonparametric inferential Mann-Whitney U test. Results suggest there are no substantial differences among them although there are subtle variations that must be taken into consideration.