The Future of English Education at Primary Schools in East Asia

While English education as a foreign language at primary schools (referred to herein as EFLPS) has gained increasing popularity, countries and regions face a number of challenges in implementing EFLPS in their formal education systems. Language-in-education policies around EFLPS are deeply embedded in their global and local contexts. As a result, some challenges have been common to multiple countries whereas others are specific to local contexts. In drawing from the experiences of tree East Asian countries (namely, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan) and the challenges that they face in implementing EFLPS, the present paper aims to illustrate the complicated ways in which both global and local factors influence EFLPS implementations. Among the various challenges, this paper focuses on the following three most notable ones: (1) accounting for diversity while providing equal access; (2) hiring native English speaking teachers versus training local teachers; and (3) the use of popular ELT methods and their adaption to local contexts.