EFL teachers’ agency in Spanish preschools: conceptions of multilingualism and their impact on early childhood teaching practices

This article examines how EFL teachers in early childhood education in Spain conceptualise multilingualism and how these conceptualisations relate to their teaching strategies and forms of agency. The study is based on five focus groups conducted in different regions of Spain (monolingual and bilingual) and analyses the data using a constructivist grounded theory approach with MAXQDA software. The results show that teachers’ attitudes towards multilingualism are primarily articulated in three ways: as an obstacle, as an invisible reality, and as a pedagogical and social resource. These attitudes are linked to teaching strategies and recurring forms of teachers’ agency. Overall, the study argues that teachers’ responses do not depend on the multilingualism of the context itself, but on the way in which linguistic diversity is recognised, legitimised and transformed into a pedagogical possibility. It highlights how contextual variation, even within the same education system, significantly shapes teachers’ understanding of multilingualism, which in turn influences their choice of teaching strategies and their professional agency. The article concludes with key implications for the training of both future and current teachers.