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

The writer finds these statements difficult to reconcile with earlier statements
that one of the most evident advantages of project pupils was the 'complexity of
structure' they used. Children's inability to generate utterances to match what
they really wanted to say seems difficult to reconcile with praise of the early
starters' use of 'complexity of structure'. This '∞mplexity of use’ would seem
memorised and rehearsed and then reproduced rather than produced.

The exact value and role of prefabricated patterns or 'Iexicalised sentence
stems' (Pawley & Syder, 1983), 'segments Ofsentences which operate in
conjunction with a moveable component, such as the insertion of a noun phrase
or a verb phrase' (Hakuta, 1974: 284) in both first and second language
development has been much debated. Wong- Fillmore (1976) suggested that
formulaic speech played a critical role in second language development
amongst the children in her study who seemed to work out form and meaning of
language through analysis of language chunks they had acquired early.

Krashen & Terrell (1988: 60), however, argued that while routines and patterns
were helpful communication strategies they did not contribute to the
development of the grammatical system of a language and were therefore
essentially different from creative language use. McLaughIin (1984: 170)
suggested that it is likely that the language learning process involves a 'dynamic
interplay between formulaic speech and the emergent rule system'. More
recently, within the context of a study which tracked the progress of a group of
11-13 year-old children learning French, 30 boys and 30 girls, Mitchell &
Dickson suggested that language chunks did not seem to be 'a marginal and

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