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

'Picking language up^,, however, clearly did not happen as was seen in the
earlier section on syntactical development, despite children 'being exposed to a
wider range of structures than in se∞ndary' (Low et al., 1995: 58). Krashen &
Terrell state that:

"According to the Input hypothesis, speaking is not absolutely essential for
language acquisition. We acquire from what we hear (or read) and
understand, not from what we say." (Krashen & Terrell, 1988: 56)

However, despite claims by Terrell (1977), Dulay, Burt & Krashen (1982) and
Krashen & Terrell (1988), it is questionable whether simply exposing learners to
meaningful and comprehensible language input is sufficient in developing
accurate use of language:

"Research...has shown quite clearly that a communicatively-oriented input-rich
environment does not provide all the necessary conditions for second
language acquisition, and that focus on form within these ∞mmunicative
settings can significantly enhance performance." (Swain, 1995: 141)

Research into Canadian immersion programmes suggests that later starters do
as well as those children who had been immersed in the se∞nd language since
kindergarten (Genesee, 1981) and while 'functional ∞mpetence is higher than
in normal foreign language classes' (Swain 1976,1981) many children make
numerous grammatical errors and appear to have 'vast gaps in their knowledge'
(Bibeau, 1984) even after several years of immersion. Swain studied the
language output of learners on French immersion programmes and found that

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