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

and learning strategies but cannot achieve full native-speaker competence,
'partial access', where the acquisition of a second language is regulated by
some innate principles and partly by general learning strategies and 'dual'
access, where adults make use of both Universal Grammar and general
cognitive and learning strategies but where general cognitive strategies might
actually 'block' access to Universal Grammar and innate mechanisms.

According to Martohadjono & Flynn the differences between child and adult
learners could at least partially be explained by 'auxiliary processes needed to
map the principles of the language faculty onto the particular demands of a
language and a range of language-related specific facts such as idiosyncratic
rules':

"A sweeping biological explanation, we submit, fails to answer the more subtle
and ultimately more interesting question of what particular aspects of linguistic
behaviour are affected by age." (Martohadjono & Flynn, 1995:151)

Is exceptional achievement limited to exceptional individuals with exceptional
talent and neurological flexibility as suggested by Novoa, Fein & Obler (1988),
Obler & Fein (1989) and Schneiderman & Desmarais:

"...neurocognitively flexible, talented learners have an extraordinary capacity to
initiate new strategies or processing pathways when faced with novel cognitive
tasks." (Schneiderman & Desmarais, 1988:110)

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