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

"...a normal child acquires knowledge Ofsentences not only as grammatical,
but also as appropriate. He or she acquires competence as to when to speak,
when not and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where, in what
manner." (Hymes, 1972: 227)

People's knowledge and use of language, conscious or subconscious, within a
social context comprises grammatical forms and semantic concepts but also an
understanding of the purpose of the language in use and a knowledge of what
to say to whom and how. As Cook argued, whether a stretch of discourse
makes sense has to do with 'our knowledge of the world and where the events
take place':

"...we employ knowledge - of the world, of the speaker, of social convention, of
what is going on around us as we read or listen - in order to make sense of the
language we are encountering." (Cook, 1989: 9)

For successful communication both are needed, knowledge of the formal
properties of language as well as knowledge of the social and psychological
context of communication. In fact, it is often a lack of native-like discourse and
pragmatic skills that make language performance difficult for the foreign
language learner once he leaves the classroom and enters the target language
community. While functions such as apologis ng and refusing are universal,
they are nevertheless embedded in a cultural context and are carried out
differently from language to language. There are differences within a particular
society as Bialystok & Hakuta point out:

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