A Critical Examination of the Beliefs about Learning a Foreign Language at Primary School

In evaluating lexical development, both in and outside the classroom, it would
seem important to take into consideration what it means to 'know' a word.

Word 'knowledge' ranges from recognising a word to producing it in a variety of
contexts, understanding a range of meanings as well as collocations and
vocabulary might be known in one sense but not another. Harley (1996), in her
introduction to Volume 53 of the Canadian Modern Language Review devoted
entirely to the theme of vocabulary learning, makes the important point that
there are degrees or aspects of word knowledge and that even native-speakers
differ in the words they 'know':

"...in terms of their formal properties, their range of meanings and the
relationships they enter into with other words." (Harley, 1996: 3)

The second or foreign language learner, just like the child acquiring his first
language, needs to learn more than the literal meaning of words. He needs to
learn their syntactical properties, how words behave in sentences and their
collocations, for example. Initially the foreign language learner might only know
the core or most ∞mmon meaning of a word but moving beyond the core
meaning of a word and being able to understand and use words across
contexts would seem more difficult within the constraints of the classroom.

The relationship between lexis and schematic knowledge and the link between
grammar and lexis with contextual factors would also seem an important
consideration. 'Knowing' a word would very much depend on the learner's
world knowledge. It would also seem to be important to add that in any
evaluation of word 'knowledge' or lexical development performance and

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