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

adolescent learners took a much more active role in sustaining a conversation
through the application Ofstrategies such as active negotiation, repetition, topic
change and use of conversation fillers. This study suggests that discourse
strategies are rarely used by child second language learners and are more
likely to be employed by adolescents and that older learners are therefore more
able to tailor input to their needs. Krashen et al. (1982) suggest that older
learners, as they are better at keeping a conversation going, might learn faster
than younger learners.

This is not to argue that young children do not have discourse skills in their first
language as they quite clearly do. However, negotiating meaning, for example,
within the context of first language development would seem a different issue to
negotiating meaning within the artificial constraints of the classroom and with
limited systemic as well as schematic knowledge. The issue of young children
'learning' discourse skills in the foreign language classroom will be discussed in
more detail in Chapter Three. In any case, studies suggest that there are no
maturational constraints on either the acquisition or the learning of such skills:

"...the fine points of speech act behaviour, such as (a) types of intensification
and downgrading, (b) subtle differences between speech act strategy
realizations, and (c) consideration of situational features, ∞uld be taught in the
foreign language classroom." (Cohen, 1996: 262)

The following paragraphs will discuss cognitive and affective factors as well as
the question of quantity and quality of learning time before addressing some
unanswered questions and problem areas.

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