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

How much is achievement affected by excellent general learning abilities and
cognitive skills aided by motivation, positive attitudes and empathy towards the
target culture? Obler & Fein (1989), for example, suggest that an exceptional
IQ is not necessary for successful second language development nor is
empathy required for the acquisition of native-like accents. The answers seem
to remain inconclusive. It would seem likely that there is considerable
difference not only between individual learners and contextual variables but also
between different aspects of language. Singleton (1995) pointed out that
different aspects of language are likely to be affected in different ways and
argued that studies needed to distinguish between aspects of the grammar of a
language on which Universal Grammar might have an influence and those
aspects of grammar which are language specific and might even develop hand
in hand with other aspects such as the lexicon.

Possible implications of relative language distance and language pairs are not
always fully taken into account. Hawkins (1981: 79-82) reports on the work of
James on the distance of English from Italian, Spanish, French, German and
Russian. James suggested that for the English speaker French and Russian
might be more difficult than Spanish and Italian and that 'cultural distance might
be a source of greater learning difficulty than purely linguistic distance'. How
can speakers of one native language acquiring or learning a second language,
therefore be compared with other native speakers acquiring or learning that
same language or a different one? In the study by Bongaerts, Planken & Schils
(1995), for example, Dutch learners of English were compared to English

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