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

observational behaviour might be unreliable indicators Ofunderlying
competence as words would seem more easily forgotten or temporarily
unavailable for recall than structural items.

The question of language pairs also seems important as cross-linguistic
similarities seem to facilitate the learning of the lexicon of a second language at
least in the initial and receptive stages. Ringboem (1987) referred to work by
Palmberg (1985) who studied the extent to which Finland-Swedish 10-yearolds
were able to understand spoken English words before they even started to Ieam
English at school. Palmberg showed that receptive mastery of a word was
frequently achieved without a great amount of conscious effort. Children listed
that they had learned words from the television, listening to music at home and
from friends and travelling. Similar points will appear in later discussions of the
special case of English and the objective evaluation of learning outcomes.

2.3.5 Maturational Constraints and the Development of Discourse and
Pragmatics

Chomsky's theory on first language development did not concern itself with the
use Ofgrammatical knowledge in actual everyday language use. Discourse
competence and pragmatic knowledge, learning how to use language
appropriately in a wide variety of contexts, however, is part of communicative
competence and thus an aspect of the overall task facing the language learner:

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