The global demand for English language teaching to young learners

The growth in teaching English as a foreign language to young learners as a distinctive area within the English Language Teaching industry during the last twenty years raises some questions over who, in an industry that has traditionally focused on adults, is going to teach these learners, aged, in this thesis, between five and sixteen years. Emerging from existing literature and the occupational experience of this researcher is a sense that teaching young learners presents different challenges and requires different skills from teaching adults. This research explored the experiences and needs of those who trained to teach adults but also teach children. Adopting a phenomenological, constructivist approach, a mixed-methods survey of multiple-item self-report questionnaires and semi-structured, face-to-face interviews was conducted to investigate the experiences and attitudes of two criteria-based samples totaling a lot of mixed-nationality EFL teachers giving out-of-school lessons in private language centers in some forty different countries.