ABSTRACT

Although over the decades, and particularly in recent years, there has been both in England and other countries a great diversity in the nature of localised projects (Edelenbos and Johnstone, 1966; Hawkins, 1996) aimed at introducing modern foreign languages (MFL) into the primary curriculum, ultimately there are only two possible options for staffing primary modern language teaching: either the pupils are taught by a specialist of some kind or they are taught by the generalist primary class teacher who is responsible for delivering all or most of the overall curriculum entitlement. In practice, the phrase ‘specialist of some kind’ has incorporated a wide variety of teaching personnel, including:

1 secondary-trained specialist MFL teachers who may seek employment as specialist MFL teachers in one or more primary schools, possibly in England under the terms of Local Education Authority (LEA) schemes;

2 specialist MFL teachers from neighbouring secondary schools who by arrangement teach classes in some of their feeder primaries;

3 secondary trained specialist MFL teachers who find employment in primary schools (maybe through phase retraining) and may operate as ‘semispecialists’ taking some colleagues’ classes for MFL on an exchange basis;

4 native speakers who are not trained teachers who are employed by schools to teach their mother tongue;

5 diverse MFL peripatetics such as MFL graduates who may not have undergone teacher training of any sort;

6 specialist primary teachers of MFL who followed a course of primary initial teacher education in which the subject was either a main or a subsidiary area of study.