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

use it in different contexts, knowing its collocations and spelling. In fact, as has
already been stated in earlier sections, much of the evaluation suggests that
children were very much context-embedded and that 'their attempts at anything
Otherthan 'the reproduction of pre-rehearsed and prefabricated language were
rare' (Low et al.,1995: 34). The reader will remember from discussions of the
literature in Chapter Two that older children consistently outperformed younger
children in the area of lexical development both in rate as well as in quantity.

3.4.4 Development of Discourse Skills

There seem to be some conflicting statements in the various reports with
regards to the development Ofdiscourse skills. On the one hand, the 1995 final
evaluation of the National Pilot states that little evidence was found Ofchildren
having developed any discourse competence and that much of the initiation of
topics was done by the researchers themselves:

"...in so far as we were able to monitor this, there was not much evidence from
lesson observations or paired interview transcripts, of pupils developing a high
level of competence in discourse. They could keep going their end of a
15-minute ∞nversation with a researcher (in itself an achievement), but there
was little evidence that they had acquired dis∞urse skills such as 'topic
initiation', 'probing', 'referring back to previous point' 'topic closure'."
(Lowetal., 1995: 177)

In a later publication, on the other hand, it is claimed that the great majority of
pupils were able to sustain an interaction with a researcher lasting roughly 15
minutes':

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