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

Terminology

Central to this thesis is the distinction between acquiring a language
in natural or near-natural circumstances and learning a language in a formal
setting, usually a classroom. The former covers the so-called mother tongue
and second languages used, for example, by relatives, colleagues and friends;
the latter the foreign languages Ieamt as part of an educational process or to
meet a putative future need. Such a distinction would seem self-evident but
much ofthe literature in the field displays a degree of randomness in the use of
terminology and concepts such as 'acquisition' and 'learning' or 'second' and
'foreign' are used inconsistently. As a result, crucial distinctions between
language acquisition contexts and language learning contexts are frequently
lost leading to confusion rather than clarification. Singleton (1989), for example,
deliberately does not distinguish:

"Language acquisition is not here distinguished from language learning...both
expressions being used throughout the book, unless context and quotation
marks indicate otherwise, in a ∞mprehensive sense." (Singleton, 1989: 7)

Linguistic distinctions and dichotomies are said to have 'fuzzy edges' which
often merely 'reflect points on a continuum' (Ringboem, 1987: 3) and the
usefulness of a dichotomy between Second Language Acquisition and Foreign
Language Learning (SLA∕FLL) is queried by Bems (1989), for example, in the
context of the acquisition and learning of English. While accepting that a
continuum best describes the shades Ofdifferences between acquiring and
learning and that a hard and fast dichotomy is not always appropriate,

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