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

language as such. In the context of discussions of phonological development it
would seem appropriate to add that during the Pilot Scheme children's ability to

respond to stimuli in French albeit with little understanding, led to widespread

beliefs in the 'success' of the audio-visual method. Her Majesty's Inspectors

(HMIs) at the time commented positively on the 'fluency' and on 'the remarkable

success' Ofaudio-Visual methodologies in primary schools with children

becoming 'bilingual and conversant with the basic idioms' (Decreus in: Libbish,
1966: 28).

3.4.2 Syntactical Development and Pre-fabricated Language

Burstall et al. (1974) reported that while the early starters made good progress

in listening, imitating and building chunks of language, those children who

started to learn French after the age of 11 were much better at adapting

language chunks to different contexts. Low et al. (1995) and Johnstone, Low &

Brown (1996) report that the majority of phrases used by pupils were

pre-fabricated chunks of language:

"Emphasis on prerehearsed phrases and only rare examples of enough pupil
confidence for the spontaneous generation of phrases in the FL were apparent
in French and German, and no clear differences between the natures of the
utterances of pupils who were continuing their primary foreign language and
those who had started a se∞nd in S1 could be discerned."

(Lowetal., 1995: 37)

Researchers state that an analysis of pupils' utterances showed 'a lack of

evidence suggesting that they had developed an 'underlying grammatical

138

<<   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   >>

More intriguing information