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

It would seem that it is at the stage of breaking chunks down into parts and
analysing these that many learners encounter difficulties:

"...it is at the stage of mastering the rules that most learners fail, often after
quite a promising start, when all they had to do was build a repertoire of
ready-made chunks of language requiring little 'adaptation'."
(Hawkins, 1996: 29)

Within the context of the Scottish National Pilot teachers thought that ^,it was
pupils' inadequate grasp Ofstructure on entering S1 which led to statements like
'il j^,aime Ie dessin' (Low et al., 1995: 182). However, Mitchell & Dickson make
the important point that:

"...gains made by the children in underlying grammatical understanding
and their growing ability to manipulate basic sentence patterns were regularly
accompanied by some loss of 'accuracy' in surface details of their speech (e.g.
errors in verb endings temporarily increased). This aspect of our findings
confirms evidence from many other studies, suggesting that certain types of
mistakes are developmentally unavoidable, as the complexities of grammar are
gradually sorted out overtime." (Mitchell & Dickson, 1997: 2)

Johnstone et al. also point out that research in foreign and second language
learning suggests that a learner's language competence does not always
develop in a 'steady and cumulative fashion':

"...it appears to be characterised by features such as variability, backsliding and
fossilisation (plateau-effect) as well as by progression."

(Johnstone, Low & Brown, 1966: 68)

142

<<   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   >>

More intriguing information