Success or failure of primary second/foreign language programmes in Asia: what do the data tell us?

Abstract

Primary school second/foreign language (SL/FL) programmes in Asia, as well as in other parts of the world, are becoming more common, with many targeting English as the SL or FL. The pressures for such English language programmes come from top-down notions that in a globalised world English is required for societies to be competitive, especially with Asian neighbours, and bottom-up pressures from parents who see English as the key to educational success for their children. In many polities, these forces have resulted in support for policies that introduce early primary school English teaching curricula for all students and have led to parents spending large sums of money on private tutoring or out-of-school tuition. This study reviews the results of nine language planning studies from the Asian region that set out to examine questions such as ‘Is this trend towards early primary SL or FL education (mainly English) realistic or is it unattainable and a waste of resources? Do children really benefit from these programmes? What needs to be done to foster learners' success?’ These issues are viewed from a language planning and policy perspective through an examination of the language-in-education policy types required for the development of successful programmes. The policies of a number of Asian countries are used as case studies to illustrate this issue.

Keywords:

• language planning
• primary school
• English as a foreign language
• language teaching
• Asia

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the following individuals for their input to the polity data as noted in Table 1 and for their comments on this paper: S. K. C. Chua (Singapore), M. O. Hamid (Bangladesh), K. Kashimoto (Japan), M. Li (China), H. T. M. Nguyen (Vietnam), P. Phyak (Nepal) and Kerry Leech-Taylor (Timor-Leste). Any remaining infelicities remain the responsibility of the authors.