Language is central to functioning in today's world. People are in daily contact with other cultures and languages. To communicate successfully in today's society, we need to develop a variety of different language skills because we need to use language in different situations. Learning is not possible if there is a lack of language skills, because language is a content of everything we learn. The belief that learning a foreign language when young has many benefits is widespread. However, the way children learn a language is very different from the way adults learn a language. Therefore, learning English in school requires adapted approaches in order to achieve the set goals and make learning efficient.
The theoretical part of the master thesis describes how early foreign language learning works and presents different psychological views on language learning. It also describes the cornerstones of convergent pedagogy applied at the school where our research was conducted.
The master's thesis explores the ways in which English is learned through its integration into the environmental science classroom. We wanted to find out how students meet the learning objectives in science and at what level their English proficiency is compared to students who do not participate in an additional integrated lesson in the weekly curriculum. We also wanted to find out if students were meeting the objectives in science and to what degree. In addition, we examined how students were interested in science, their everyday exposure to English, and their overall well-being when exposed to English, science, and integrated lessons.
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