“Does the English-only class benefit all learners?”

The present study explores elementary school teachers’ attitudes toward the English-only instruction policy in relation to student learning and their opinions concerning teachers’ effective language use in the elementary English classroom. To this end, the study has adopted a mixed methods design, in which the database consists of 1327 in-service elementary school teachers’ questionnaire responses and semi-structured, open-ended interviews with 23 teachers. After the quantitative data collection was completed, the qualitative data were gathered to gain in-depth understandings about the topics being concerned through the teachers’ own voices. Survey results showed that the teacher participants in the study did not agree with the effectiveness of the TETE policy in terms of students’ learning, and tended to use both Korean and English as medium languages of instruction. It was also noted that the participants’ thoughts on the policy were largely independent of the teacher characteristics. Interview results not only corroborated with the survey results but also provided useful information concerning why and when the teachers thought using Korean could be beneficial for the students’ learning. Interview participants suggested that incomprehensible input or exposure is meaningless for the students’ learning of English, and the use of Korean is useful in both instructional and non-instructional domains.