Teachers’ Perceptions Towards Textbook Suitability and Emergent Literacy in EFL Students

Lowering the age of English teaching has become a trend in many countries in recent years (Rixon, 2013), however, not much attention has been paid to the need for trained staff. Chile is not the exception.  The government launched an initiative to teach English from the first grade of primary, but overlooked important factors. Firstly, most teachers of English lack the methodology to work with children under 10 years old (Inostroza, 2015; Barahona, 2016), and while primary teachers may know how to work with children, they generally have little knowledge of English (ibid). To overcome this gap, the government commissioned the creation of textbooks for teachers and students, ignoring, however, children’s literacy skills. Secondly, there is the issue of emergent literacy skills in this context. An astonishing 96% of first year students in public schools do not know the letters of the alphabet (Melo, 2022). Nevertheless, the textbooks provided by the government have a strong literacy focus. The aforementioned represents a challenge for English teachers, who are in need of methodologies for young learners, but to make matters worse, research in the context suggest that primary teachers tend to have a deficit of effective strategies when it comes to teaching literacy (Medina et., al, 2015; Morales & Pulido-Cortés, 2023).