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

Gass, for example, in a distinction between Variables internal to the learner* and
'variables external to the Іеатеґ states that:

"In particular, the psycholinguistic task learners are faced with, the abilities that
learners come to the learning situation with, the potential motivation they bring
to the learning task do not depend on the learning situation; whether it be a
foreign language classroom, a classroom in a second language environment,
or so-called naturalistic 'street' learning in a se∞nd language situation."
(Gass, 1989: 35)

Chaudron (1988) and Van Patten (1989) argued that the second language
acquisition context and foreign language learning context clearly needed to be
distinguished. Berns (1989) developed the second language acquisition and
foreign language learning dichotomy further and suggested that the degree of
exposure to the target language outside the classroom influenced learning
outcomes and effectively turned some foreign language learning contexts into
second language acquisition contexts. In any consideration of context, the
language being learned as much as the language being shared by the majority
of the learners can therefore not be left out of the debate. The status of English
as a lingua franca is likely to affect foreign language learning procedures and
outcomes for those children who already speak English as it is for those who
learn English as a foreign or second language. In this respect, primary school
classrooms in England represent a special challenge.

Some children speak more than one language with native-speaker fluency but
this is seldom because they have 'learned' these languages at school.

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