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

"...for uninterrupted dialogue with an adult who can give the child
individual attention at the critical age when the child is learning to match his
expanding ∞nceptual universe to the linguistic symbols of the mother tongue."
(Hawkins, 1984:14)

Those children who are the better readers are likely to make the better
language learners as both reading and foreign language learning require
children to infer meaning in frequently ’decontextualised’ situations and those
children who experience difficulties in their first language literacy skills often
experience difficulties in learning a foreign language in the formal classroom.
It has already been reported in Chapter Three that it is precisely at the stage
when written language is introduced that some children start to experience
problems with the foreign language.

For effective foreign language learning in the classroom a degree of literacy
would therefore seem essential. The young child who has not mastered at least
basic first language literacy skills, is likely to find foreign language learning very
burdensome, often frustrating and eventually demotivating. Any suggestions
that, in the classroom, 'younger is better¹ and that children should Ieam a
foreign language from the generally 'pre-literate' age of five must therefore be
regarded as ill-conceived. In fact, the time when children start primary school is
the time when, in addition to the emotional upset of being separated from their
parents, many children have to make the transition from spoken to written
language in their first language and often from dialect to standard 'norms'.

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