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

As has been d scussed previously, many early foreign language learning
programmes aim to develop communicative competence in young learners.
The reader will remember that the Scottish National Pilot aims to develop
communicative competence in a foreign language amongst young learners and
as recently as 1997 a Council of Europe working party stated that:

"Throughout the deliberations of the 5 workshops and the research and
development work undertaken in the inteπm, there would seem to be an almost
universal consensus that children should acquire Communicative Competence
through a structured, systematic approach to their learning, in terms of aims
and ∞ntent, approprate methodologies, evaluation and assessment."
(Doye & Hurrell, 1997: 93)

The discussions that follow in subsequent sections therefore need to be read
within the broad framework of developing a learner’s 'communicative
competence' in terms of learning a language as a system as well as how to put
knowledge, understanding and skills to use.

4.3.1 Consciousness and The Importance of Noticing

Already in 1963, the editorial introduction to Beyayev's book The Psychology of
Teaching Foreign Languages', stressed the need for a 'conscious analysis of
various linguistic facts' in successful foreign language learning. Although the
exact nature of the interplay between innate language specific mechanisms and
general cognitive processes is still unknown and although some aspects of a
language might be acquired through innate language mechanisms, possibly
depending on the language pairs involved, a degree Ofconsciousness,

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