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

Harris (1993) reports a study by Miller (1985) which measured 'central learning'
(memory of task-related items) and 'incidental learning' by asking children of
different ages to focus on cards with pictures of pars of household items and
animals. It was found that when children were asked to match the animals with
the household items they had appeared with on the cards (central learning),
recall improved with age. Older children had been able to concentrate more
efficiently on the task at hand, to attend more selectively and to block out
extraneous information’ (Harris, 1993: 530). These findings suggest that
younger dhildren are less likely than older children to be able to draw
conclus ons from limited examples and to gain maximum benefit from limited
input.

4.3.4 Noticing and Syntactical Development

The successful acquisition of the sound system of a language is a necessary
and important first step n language Iearnng and the majority of young learners
might indeed be good and willing imitators. However, the successful learning of
a language requires more than the accurate imitaton of sound and intonation
patterns. Ifthe young foreign language learner is to make progress he also
needs to 'construct' the structural system of the language. Already in 1963
Belyayev argued that if the learners are to Ieam from language examples,
rather than the examples themselves, they have to notice patterns and
regularities. They need to be able to induce patterns and regularities from
limited language input, they need to draw analogies and make generalisations
about the language. They need to be able to recognise grammatical functions

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