The Qualitative and Quantitative Rise of Literature on Teaching English to Young Learners

When I started teaching English in the mid-1990s ‘young learner’ classes were an appendix to the adult business of out-of-school ELT. English as a subject or foreign language in primary mainstream education was tentatively being experimented with and introduced unsystematically and in different ways in various contexts. For example, in France, English was introduced into the last year of primary school in 1989 (M.E.N. 2001) and only reached 1st...