What should our “English Literacy” course students (from the Faculty ofEducation) know or need to know in order to be able to teach English literacyin Preschool and Primary School?

Resumen

In the current educational framework and with the new Plurilingual Programmes established by the “Conselleria d’Educació”, there is a tendency to introduce L2 instruction at early ages (4 years old) along with increased exposure to L2 through not only by increasing the number of hours of English lessons (“Decreto 108/2014”) but teaching non-linguistic areas in English (“Decreto 9/2017”). For this reason, the introduction of literacy in English makes more sense in this new context since it allows an approach to teaching writing and reading English at an earlier age and it is also necessary to have a good reading comprehension and writing expression abilities in order to success when learning other areas of the curriculum in English. As these are the skills our future teachers will need, to be successful in their task as English teachers, so it is necessary for them to master teaching English literacy when teaching English or in English. Along our “Literacy in English Language” course, we try to gather all the epistemological and practical knowledge our Degree in Education students’ need to know about English literacy to help them success in their future task as English Teachers. Along the 7 years this course has been taught, we have modified the contents and the practice worked, trying to adapt and improve the contents worked in the English Literacy course, in a way that students can obtain a more practical, feasible and successful acquisition of how to teach English literacy to young learners, as almost most of the students have no previous knowledge of English phonetics before taking our course. This fact makes very hard teaching them in a 60 hours course how to teach something they are not acquainted with. This is the reason why the course contents and practice are continuously under revision and is re-designed to serve currently as an introduction to English phonetics (dealing with English sounds and their representation, what linguistics is and its branches, and Phonetics and Phonology, minimal pairs, the English alphabet and the letters-sounds equivalences, RP, IPA symbols, classifying the English Sounds among others) as well as getting students familiarized with the traditional and innovative teaching methodologies of English literacy (historical review of the Reading and Writing teaching methods in English: the Alphabetic method, Whole Word method and Whole Language method, teaching Phonics: Analytic vs Synthetic phonics and Literacy Skills…). The course also offers an overview of some of the different existing programs. Apart from all these theoretical aspects, the course is complemented with plenty of practical exercises, activities and presentations which help students put into practice and face the reality of teaching Spanish students to read and write in English. To collect information about how efficient is nowadays the course teaching English phonetics and English Literacy methods, a pretest has been designed by all the professors include in this RED, which was passed (at the beginning of the course), and a post-test, which will be passed (once the course is finished this academic course), to the around 125 students taking the course. The aim of this study is tofind out how much they knew on the topic and how much they have learnt after the course, to measure how efficient the course contents are and if more adjustments are needed for further academic courses. Also a questionnaire is been elaborated to take into account students’ perception about what course contents students find more useful and relevant, and if some relevant contents are missed or if some contents taught are not important for their training, in their opinion.