An exploratory study on English teachers’ opinions in multicultural preschools

Abstract

Developing plurilingualism is one of the objectives of the European Union and therefore the teaching of foreign languages (FLs) has acquired particular relevance in the last decade. Spain has made a great effort to promote an early start of the foreign language teaching in all its regions; however, there is an enormous gap between the legislative and methodological level, mainly due to the lack of uniformity regarding the decentralization of the education system (Calero, 2006). This target may be more challenging in places such as Ceuta or Melilla, two Spanish cities on the north coast of Africa, due to their particular multicultural context, where preschool classrooms are already multilingual, despite the FL. Based on the interpretative paradigm, this paper presents an exploratory study on English Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ opinions at preschools in Ceuta and Melilla. We carried out eight interviews to EFL teachers analysing their own practice in these multicultural preschool classrooms, where monolingual and bilingual children share their learning experience with the common objective of developing their communicative competence in English. Conclusions suggest that the multicultural context within these two cities may cause some conflictive situations, mainly due to limited competence on Spanish and to null motivation towards the learning of FLs.