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

"One of the most critical ways in which they differed was in having the social
skills required to make use of the social strategies..."
(Wong-Fillmore, 1979: 220)

Wong-Fillmore's study was carried out in a naturalistic setting with mainly
context-embedded language use where children did not talk about 'displaced'
events or topics. However, these differences amongst children quite clearly
suggest that learning a second language even in naturalistic settings, is not a
totally uniform process and that while some might do rather well others struggle.

Social strategies, however, take on a different role in the foreign language
classroom. Children's social problems identified by Wong-Fillmore such as 'how
to get along for a while without a common language' and 'how to get your
friends to help and provide input' exist to a much lesser extent in a foreign
language classroom where most of the children share a language they can
resort to in order to overcome any problems. The English speaking child
learning French for example does not need to use French to socialise with his
peers. In such a context meta∞gnitive and cognitive strategies, such as
defined by O'Malley & Chamot (1990) and by Oxford (1990) as controlling,
planning and evaluating the learning process, directing and selecting attention,
self-monitoring and evaluation, note-taking, reasoning, deduction,
recombination and summarising, would seem rather more important than social
ones.

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