Download - EnglishAgenda - British Council

time. At the very start of early FLL the teacher and classroom processes play a keyrole (Vilke, 1993; Nikolov, 2002), but with growing age their impact changes andother sources seem to direct the ups and downs of YL motivation. In this studythe high motivation in Grade Two dropped in Grade Three and increased again inGrade Four. We assume that by Grade Four many YLs had experienced a feelingof achievement and this boosted again their motivation for EFL learning. Withan increased knowledge of the language they could make better use of it whenwatching the many English language TV programmes and films, or when using theinternet.Inquiries into first graders’ motivation during the ELLiE project scoping year(Szpotowicz, Mihaljevic Djigunovic and Enever, 2009) showed that of all classroomactivities they engaged in YLs were most motivated for learning new FL words.Thus we continued measuring Croatian young EFL learners’ attitudes to learningnew English words during three years. As shown in Figure 2, motivation for learningnew words remained high throughout the three years but decreased a little inGrade Four. Judging from the activities YLs reported as favourite (see below),in Grade Four new activities – such as reading – became very popular too andcompeted with learning new vocabulary.2,7872,762,742,722,72,682,662,646543210grade 2 grade 3 grade 4Figure 2: YLs’ scores on smiley item: How do you like learning new English wordsthis year? (scale range: 1-3)YLs’ attitudes to EFL classes were looked into as well. Their preferences fordifferent classroom activities in Grade Two were compared with those in GradeFour (Figure 3).Early EFL Learning | 173