Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
OPUS Uluslararası Toplum Araştırmaları Dergisi, cilt.8, sa.14, ss.411-431, 2018 (Hakemli Dergi)
English holds a lingua franca status all around the world today and foreign language education in most countries is primarily based on English. As a result of this high popularity of English lan-guage, primary school students now take English course as of Grade 2 in state schools in Turkey. Furthermore, private schools mostly offer English course as of Grade 1 or even kindergarten. This recent policy of low-age exposure to English has its roots in the ‘critical age’ principle. This qualita-tive study aims to explore the perceptions of primary school students ranging from Grade 2 to Grade 4 as to English through students-generated drawings. 268 students from three different primary schools (state) in Samsun, Turkey participated in the study and were asked to simply draw about English. Drawings here constitute the major data collection tool for the study and are intend-ed to uncover the feelings or opinions of this low-age group of students about English. The collected drawings were handled through content analysis; and then the gathered data were coded and cate-gorized as different images for the notion ‘English’. Objects, interaction, English class, English course book, English teacher, etc. are among the most frequently depicted images. The qualitative findings of this study may be quite important considering the need to see the reflections of the recently-offered early English courses on young English language learners.