The LExEI project: Designing a new foriegn language teacher profile for early childhood education in the spanish context

Abstract

The importance of the Early Childhood Education as a key stage for the integral development of the individual (Marope & Kaga, 2015) as well as the raised of multilingualism as a distinctive feature of our society (European Commission, 2002, 2003; Enever 2015) has led to a growing interest in the area of early foreign language learning (EFLL). Within this scenario numerous European projects and policies during the last decades aimed at introducing and researching foreign languages at the pre-school stage, such as ELLiE (Enever, 2011), Bilfam -Proyect Bilingual Family Project- (Pirchio, Taschner, Colibaba, Gheorghiu and Jursová, 2015) or PASS -Parents as Successful Teachers- (Sokol and Lasevich, 2015) or Pepelino (Goullier, Carré-Karlinger, Orlova and Roussi, 2015). In this context, teachers are key factors to success (González-Davies, 2007, cited in Celaya, 2012) and yet, as some European studies suggest (European Commission, 2003, 2005, 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2013; Edelenbos, Johnstone and Kubanek, 2006; Enever, 2011, 2014), there is a lack of adequately trained teachers in Europe to meet this new demand.