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

Harris (1983: 532) reported that eight year old children when asked to
remember a list of 18 items, rehearsed by repeating the last thing they saw or
heard whereas eleven and thirteen year old children rehearsed the complete
list, adding each new word or item to the end of the list. The rehearsal strategy
of the older children seemed far superior to that of the younger children who
remembered a much smaller percentage of items. Older children are said to
use more thorough and systematic visual strategies, they spontaneously use
rehearsal strategies to improve memory and they generally organise material
for understanding and remembering in a more efficient way. They also seem to
be more realistic in their assessment of the difficulty of a particular task.

Chesterfield & Barrows-Chesterfield (1985) examined the development of
second language learning strategies among Mexican children in bilingual
pre-school and first grade classrooms in the USA. They found that strategies
formed an important part of verbal interactions in bilingual classrooms and that
increased proficiency in the second language was linked to an increase in the
use of strategies both in range and complexity. Their study also showed that
those strategies which require a degree of metalinguistic awareness and those
which are likely to sustain a conversation generally developed with age but
were not employed by all children. Individual differences between children were
found in both the rate of development of strategies as well as in their
application. On a scale ranging from repetition, memorisation and formulaic
language at the bottom to monitoring and requesting clarification at the top, the
'bottom' strategies such as repetition and memorising were used by most

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