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).Within a context where children from public schools historically exhibit low emergent literacy skills, numbers that declined almost by a 50% after the pandemic (Melo, 2022), it can be expected that introducing literacy in a foreign language before or at the same time as literacy in the first language is acquired, can be quite problematic.The issue of low emergent literacy skills in Chilean public schools is directly linked to factors such as socioeconomic status (Balladares & Kankarâs, 2020; Hannon et al, 2020), which has been previously reported within this context by Universidad de Chile (2011), finding that 49% of the population, belonging to the lower socioeconomic status, consider themselves non-readers.Another important aspect is the fact that this country has the largest average class size within the OECD's countries, with a mean of 28 pupils (OECD, 2020).Class size has been signaled as a significant aspect when learning literacy, according to previous research (Guardia & Mendiveo, 2016).Finally, as formerly mentioned, the lack of properly trained staff is a considerable element that has been extensively discussed worldwide by the literature (Inostroza, 2015;Barahona, 2016; Garton et., al. 2011).