The project centers on an online professional development course called Teaching English to Young Learners, often abbreviated in the field as TEYL. The course is being led by Shin together with Woomee Kim, and the two faculty members will oversee five separate course sections through the university’s Global Online Teacher Education Center, known as GOTEC. The initiative is expected to reach approximately 125 teachers this year, connecting English language educators from widely differing national and institutional contexts in a shared learning environment built around the specific challenges of teaching English to children.

From a technical and pedagogical standpoint, the TEYL course addresses a long-standing gap in the language education field. Much of the foundational research and training in English language teaching has historically focused on adolescent and adult learners, whose cognitive profiles, motivation structures, and classroom behaviors differ substantially from those of young children. Teaching children a foreign or additional language requires distinct strategies: instruction must be developmentally appropriate, heavily scaffolded, and often embedded in play, story, song, and multimodal activity. Teachers working with young learners must also manage classroom dynamics, family expectations, and assessment practices that look very different from those used with older students. A dedicated professional development track for this population of educators is therefore not merely an extension of general English language teacher training but a distinct area of expertise in its own right.

The delivery model chosen for the course, fully online and organized into multiple sections, reflects broader trends in teacher education research. Online and blended professional development has become an increasingly important vehicle for reaching teachers in regions where in-person training is scarce, expensive, or logistically impractical. Asynchronous and synchronous online formats allow working teachers to participate without leaving their classrooms for extended periods, and they enable a single expert faculty team to serve a geographically dispersed cohort. At the same time, researchers in online teacher education have emphasized that course design matters enormously: effective programs combine structured content with opportunities for collaboration, reflection, and the co-construction of practice among participants. The George Mason project explicitly frames its work around building a community of practice, a concept drawn from the learning sciences that describes groups of practitioners who learn together by sharing experiences, problems, and solutions over time.

That community-of-practice orientation is central to how the project describes its goals. Rather than treating professional development as a one-way transmission of expert knowledge to passive recipients, the Teaching English to Young Learners course is designed to convene English language teachers from around the world around a shared professional concern: the teaching of children. In such a community, a teacher in one country may describe a successful storytelling technique while another adapts it to a large, low-resource classroom elsewhere; a third participant may raise a question about assessing very young learners that prompts discussion across the whole group. This kind of distributed, peer-supported learning is difficult to achieve in short workshops but is well suited to sustained online formats that persist over weeks or months and that deliberately cultivate interaction among participants.

The institutional home for the work, the Global Online Teacher Education Center, carries a mission that the university states as advancing research and pedagogy in online teacher education and professional development around the world in ways that are inclusive, accessible, and culturally and linguistically responsive and sustaining. That language signals a research agenda as much as a service mission. GOTEC faculty, including those involved in the current project, conduct research on how online teacher education functions: what design features support teacher learning, how cross-cultural cohorts interact, and how digital professional development can be made responsive to teachers’ local linguistic and cultural contexts. The TEYL course delivery project is therefore doubly valuable: it provides direct professional development to practicing teachers while simultaneously generating a site for scholarly inquiry into online teacher education at a global scale.

The funding pathway itself is instructive about how internationally oriented education projects are often financed. The U.S. Department of State supports English language programming around the world as part of its public diplomacy and educational exchange portfolio, frequently channeling resources through implementing organizations. In this case, Family Health International serves as the prime recipient, with George Mason University participating through a subaward. Such arrangements are common in internationally funded education and development work, allowing specialist academic units to contribute research expertise and instructional capacity within larger funded programs. The $100,000 award size reflects a focused, scalable intervention: rather than a large infrastructure grant, it funds the design, staffing, and delivery of five course sections serving roughly 125 teachers, which works out to a per-teacher investment that can be examined when evaluating the efficiency of online professional development relative to face-to-face alternatives.

The timing of the award, spanning academic year 2026-27, positions the project within a period of rapid change in both language education and online learning. Artificial intelligence tools, automated speech recognition, and adaptive learning platforms are reshaping what is possible in language classrooms, and teachers of young learners increasingly need support in evaluating and integrating these technologies in developmentally appropriate ways. At the same time, global demand for English instruction at the primary level remains strong in many education systems, driven by curricular reforms that introduce English earlier in schooling. This early-start trend has intensified the need for teachers who are specifically trained to work with children, since primary teachers recruited from general education backgrounds may lack specialized training in second language acquisition for young learners, and secondary-trained language teachers may be unfamiliar with child-centered pedagogy. Programs like TEYL respond directly to this structural gap in the workforce.

The emphasis on culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy in the GOTEC mission also connects the project to significant currents in contemporary education research. Scholars in the field have argued that teacher education should not position any single cultural model of teaching as universal, and that effective professional development helps teachers build on the linguistic and cultural resources their students already possess. For a global cohort of English teachers, this means the course content and discussions must be adaptable to classrooms in which English is a foreign language, a second language, or a medium of instruction, and to contexts ranging from well-resourced urban schools to under-resourced rural settings. An online community of practice spanning these contexts can surface this diversity productively, allowing participants to compare approaches and develop more nuanced, context-sensitive understandings of what teaching English to young learners can look like.

As the funding period proceeds through late September 2027, the College of Education and Human Development expects the project to deliver on both of its interlocking aims: high-quality professional development for approximately 125 English language teachers of young children, and ongoing faculty research through the Global Online Teacher Education Center into how such global online programs can be designed, delivered, and improved. The award underscores George Mason’s positioning in this space; as Virginia’s largest public research university, enrolling more than 40,000 students from 130 countries and all 50 states, the institution has built its recent growth around innovation, accessibility, and engagement with global challenges. A project that connects a Virginia research university with English teachers across multiple continents, supported by U.S. Department of State funding administered through a non-governmental implementing partner, illustrates the increasingly networked character of contemporary teacher education, in which expertise, technology, and international cooperation converge to strengthen teaching practice one cohort at a time.

Subject of Research: Online professional development course delivery and research for teachers of English to young learners through George Mason University's Global Online Teacher Education Center.

Article Title: Shin receives funding for AY26-27 TEYL course delivery

Article References: Shin receives funding for AY26-27 TEYL course delivery. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: George Mason University, Joan Kang Shin, Teaching English to Young Learners, online teacher education, professional development, U.S. Department of State, Family Health International, GOTEC, English language teaching, community of practice, global education, College of Education and Human Development