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

Who judges what and how is performance judged? In the Dunkel & Pillet study,
for example, results were based on subjective judgements by the teachers
themselves. Long (1993) suggests that all native-speaker judges should be
monolingual since there is:

"...increasing experimental and anecdotal evidence that learning
additional languages can sometimes affect first language abilities in as yet
poorly understood ways, and might influence NSs' judgements of the
grammaticality or acceptability of potential test items." (Long, 1993: 205)

What about accents? Are these easier to judge than syntactical attainment as
Scovel (1988) suggested? Not necessarily so it would seem. In the Bongaerts,
Planken & Schils study (1995) native-speaker judges from the North of England
rated the Dutch foreign language learners who had been trained to speak
'Received Pronunciation English' more highly than the English native-speakers
from the South of England. As McLaughIin (1984: 57) asks, what exactly does
it mean 'to speak with an accent'?

What constitutes an error? Arbitrary decisions concerning correct or incorrect
data often have to be made and native-speakers themselves not always come
to agreement in grammatical judgement tasks. How does loss or gain in one
language domain affect loss or gain in another? The question of competence
and performance in a Chomskyan sense would seem to have particular
relevance in the communicative classroom where language behaviour does not
necessarily reflect language competence.

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