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

even after plenty of language input they had not acquired much grammatical
competence. Comprehensible and meaningful input alone does therefore not
seem to lead to more accurate and advanced language performance.
Comprehensible language output, however, raises consciousness, it
encourages the learner to notice gaps between his Interlanguage and the target
language, it allows the learner to test things out, receive feedback and modify
future output accordingly:

"Comprehensible output...is a necessary mechanism Ofacquisition
independent of the role of comprehensible input. Its role is, at minimum,
to provide opportunities for contextualized, meaningful use, to test out
hypotheses about the target language, and to move the learner from a purely
semantic analysis of the language to a syntactic analysis of it."
(Swain, 1985: 252)

Meaningful and comprehensible language output therefore seems important,
raising questions about the value of extensive 'total physical response' activities
as proposed by Asher (1969,1972) in second language development. It would
also seem important, as stated earlier, that the formal properties of language
should be taught. What became apparent in interviews with the teachers, both
primary and secondary, during the S∞ttish evaluation was that they clearly
perceived differences in children's 'abilities' to ∞pe with the more formal
aspects of language and that many children simply did not benefit from more
focused instruction. Widdowson (1990) suggests that a conscious focus on
form ∞uld be encouraged through problem-solving tasks which enable learners
to notice the formal properties of the target language. Such an approach would

173

<<   170   171   172   173   174   175   176   >>

More intriguing information