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

3.4.7 Learning Strategies

The 1995 report on the National Pilot emphasises the importance of strategies
in successful foreign language learning and clearly indicates differences
amongst individual children with respect to the application of these. However,
because children of different ages seem to be grouped together, such as P7
(last year of primary school) and S1 (first year of secondary school) as well as
the fact that some classes were composite classes, it is not clear whether the
use of such strategies was age-related:

"First, the clearest difference between successful and less successful pupils at
P7 and S1 appeared to be an awareness of the importance of
self-management strategies, especially those of a cognitive and language
production kind. To a lesser extent, a consciousness of emotional
self-management and the importance of guessing and inferencing and of using
the written word for learning and memorisation, also distinguished the
successful from the less successful at each stage...the successful P7 pupils
produced substantially more examples than the other three groups of
statements about self-management (of all kinds), making use of textual
resources, guessing and inferencing, use of the written word for learning or
memorisation and attention to accuracy." (Low et al., 1995: 88)

The 1995 report further states that those pupils who were less successful were
'less likely than the other groups to mention planning, monitoring and evaluation
or asking the teacher for help as a useful strategy*. Children's statements on
the use of strategies include views such as 'it helps if you are enthusiastic',
'be honest and say you weren't listening', 'join in don't be shy', 'try to get used to
it', 'revise for a week', 'look out for accents above the words'. There might be a
difference between being able to describe a strategy and applying such a

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