Yuko Goto Butler’s latest book gathers research on language development and pedagogy among children learning a foreign language and presents it in a manner that bridges research and practice.
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Yuko Goto Butler, director of the Graduate School of Education’s Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Program, has long fielded requests from her students for a wide-ranging book of best practices that could help guide them in their English language teaching of children after graduation. But she never had anything to recommend because a comprehensive overview of young children’s foreign language learning didn’t exist. So, Butler wrote it herself.
Graduate School of Education assistant professor Yuko Goto Butler.
(Image: Courtesy of Penn GSE)
”Children's Additional Language Learning in Instructional Settings: Implications for Teaching and Future Research” (Multilingual Matters) gathers together, for the first time, up-to-date research on language development and pedagogy among children learning a foreign language and presents it in a manner that bridges research and practice. Each chapter starts with a practitioner’s question such as, “What is unique about teaching an additional language to children?” and “How do tasks and interactions promote children’s additional language learning?” Butler then fills out the chapter, sharing relevant research findings related to those queries and offering discussion questions and recommended reading for further study.
“In the last 20 years or so, there has been a rapidly expanding number of children learning foreign languages in a school setting,” Butler says. “So, it is receiving increasing attention now, but relatively speaking, our accumulation of theoretical and empirical work is somewhat limited.”
Butler hopes readers will absorb that individual differences play a huge part in children’s language learning. Because the learners are still so early in their development and schooling, there can be substantial diversity in how children learn language, even within the same classroom, she said.
“I come from an experimental research background, and experimental researchers tend to control things as much as possible to try to understand a simple cause-and-effect relationship,” she says. “But reality is much more complicated. There are so many factors that interfere with each other and so many individual differences across children. Contextualizing individual student learning is going to be crucial in understanding children's language learning. Everybody is different.”
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