Early Foreign Language Learning and Teaching. Evidence Versus Wishful Thinking: Marianne Nikolov and Stela Letica Krevelj (eds.), Multilingual Matters, 2025, 360 pp.

Early (foreign) language education, also referred to as ‘teaching young learners’, is generally seen as focusing on children between two and twelve years old (ELLRA n.d.), and due to the widespread lowering of the formal starting age of a foreign language (FL), usually English, around the world, it is a field of language education which has become more prominent in the twenty-first century. Research into early language learning (ELL) has evolved immensely in recent years, moving from the fuzzy sidelines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition, with a focus on starting ages and age-appropriate teaching methods (Garton and Copland 2018), towards the f ield of educational linguistics, which ‘covers the total education process, moving beyond classroom studies and issues related to teaching and learning, to include cultural, political, historical and ideological issues’ (Alstad and Mourão 2021: 320—italics in original).