Challenges faced by english language teachers in teaching English to young learners in public primary schools

Knowing English has gained great significance since it is the lingua franca for global communication. Consequently, many countries introduced Teaching English to Young Learners in their primary curriculum to raise people with English competency. Owing to this decision many problems came out globally. The purpose of this study is to find out challenges faced by public primary school English teachers in Teaching English to Young Learners in a certain district of Istanbul from English teachers' and administrators' perspectives and encourages stakeholders involved that setting to suggest solutions to overcome the problems. As for the purpose of this study qualitative research design was implemented. The data was collected through open-ended questionnaire and semi-structured focus group interviews. Data was collected from 45 English teachers and 53 administrators from all 21 schools in that district. Results showed that challenges of English teachers are mainly about five themes: institutional, instructional, teacher-related, learner-related, and community-related challenges. Participants provided many applicable solutions to the problems. Moreover, the study proposed guiding implications. To illustrate, it provided evidence to the urgent need for training of primary school English teachers on TEYL in the certain context. It is found that the number of hours students are exposed to language should be improved, infrastructure at schools should be checked regularly, textbooks provided by the Ministry of National Education should be revised and include interesting, entertaining, hands-on activities to be used with young learners and TEYL curriculum should be applicable and simple. Besides, parents- school cooperation should be strengthened. Decisions, policy changes and adaptations on education should not be made suddenly without conducting the necessary actions to guarantee the effective implementations in classrooms. It is strongly recommended that the communication between administrators and teachers should be improved so that problems faced by teachers can be conveyed to upper management in order to solve them in communication with teachers. Key Words: Teaching English to Young Learners, challenges of teachers