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

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the learning of a foreign language in British
primary school classrooms. Chapter One presents the historical background to
early foreign language learning in Britain and describes the situation in primary
schools in the 1990s. Chapter Two investigates the origins of the belief that
younger is better, examines the literature on the age factor in second language
development and in doing so, inevitably draws on a wide range of studies from
a variety of contexts. Chapter Three reviews the learning outcomes from the
Scottish National Pilot and compares these with outcomes from the Pilot
Scheme, the first large-scale early foreign language learning project. Chapter
Four deals with a range of substrates required in learning a foreign language
efficiently and ultimately successfully within the artificial constraints of the
classroom. Chapters Five and Six report the findings from case studies carried
out in two primary schools in England and analyse and discuss data collected in
these schools through lesson observations, interviews and questionnaires. It is
argued that the belief that 'younger is better¹ for learning a foreign language in
the classroom is not supported by a detailed examination of the literature on
age in second language development. Learning out∞mes from early foreign
language learning projects both past and present do not provide convincing
evidence that 'younger is better* for learning a foreign language in the
classroom either. Data from the two case studies further indicate that 'younger*
might not necessarily be 'better* for all children in all circumstances. The
combined evidence thus suggests that the commonly held belief that 'younger is
better* for the learning of a foreign language remains questionable.

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