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

Being able to read and write also frees the Ieamer from the teacher or the tape
as the only input source and creates scope for autonomous learning,
independent from the teacher and at the learner's own pace.

Children ofthe same Chronolog cal age clearly vary in the development of their
first language literacy skills as these skills are learned' and 'taught' rather than
'caught^,. Context-embedded language is largely a direct reflection of
experience but the skills and capacities needed to deal with de-conte×tualised
language are different from those involved when language siππpl¹y arises from
concrete situations. Some children find the trans tion from what Bruner (1967)
called 'communicative' to 'analytic' competence d fficult as they seem to be
unable to dis-embed their thinking from the context of immediate activity.

Torrance & Olson (1985) suggest that an important component ofthe ability to
deal with decontextualised language is the ability to d stance oneself from
language, to comment on language, to encode propositions and t© comment on
these. They suggested that children differ in these abilities and that the
differences between them were displayed in their ability to use 'psychological
verbs' such as 'think' or 'know'.

Hav√kins (1984) comments on the possible relationshp between dhildren's
background and their read ng attainment and suggests that children from less
advantaged backgrounds do not always have the opportunity:

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