In Slovenia, there are a great number of branch schools with multigrade instruction. Teaching in such departments requires specific didactic and organizational knowledge, which we believe is often not acquired at the faculties, during teacher education studies.
Since 2013, English has been present in Slovene schools as an optional subject in the first grade of primary school and as a compulsory subject from second grade on and that is why teaching English in early years of child's development has become a highly discussed topic. Similar to teaching in multi-grade classrooms, there are specific didactic-methodical approaches that need to be taken into consideration while teaching English to young learners.
In practice, we have experienced how special and complex teaching English in combined classes can be. It was at that time that we came up with some questions that then led us to this master's thesis.
In the theoretical part of the master’s thesis, we focused on two main topics: combined classroom lessons and English lessons in the first triad of primary school. First, we explained the concepts of combined teaching, combined department and quickly reviewed the history of this form of teaching. Later, we focused on teaching English to young learners and on the training that teachers get for multigrade instruction of English in the first triad of primary school. We also talked about the advantages and disadvantages of multigrade instruction and of multigrade instruction of English and finally about the forms of organization, planning and implementation of such form of instruction.
In order to be able to check the theory in practice as well, we conducted an interview with ten teachers who had ever taught combined English lessons in the first triad of primary school. In addition to describing their planning, organizational and implementational models of teaching English to young learners in combined classes, we also obtained opinions from these teachers on the quality of knowledge acquired in such classes. We also wanted to know if our interviewees feel fully qualified or trained for teaching English in combined classes.
Our research has shown that teachers mostly feel fully qualified for teaching English in such classes but they attribute their qualifications to their own experience they have gained over the years of teaching and they wish they had started their professional journeys with more experience or information about teaching in combined classes. The results of the research show that the interviewed teachers find multigrade instruction of English of a good quality if the accompanying conditions are met.
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