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

"Since the foreign language learner's whole personality is not involved in the
learning process in the same way as in the se∞nd language learner's, most
social and affective factors lose at least some of their importance in a foreign
language learning context. Culture shock is hardly experienced at all, until the
learner goes to the foregn country." (Rincfboem, 1987: 29)

In the classroom some children might display positive attitudes and empathy
towards the speakers of a target language for personal reasons such as regular
holidays or personal and family connections. Others, however, might have little
reason or need to empathise and what might be classified as 'empathy' might
well be a case of neutrality or even ignorance as many young children are often
unaware that a specific culture or group of people even exists or, if they are
aware of its existence, know very little about it. And why should children in the
English primary school classroom have a general desire to be like the
native-speakers of the language they are learning unless they are likely to
integrate closely with the target culture? Burstall et al. (1974) suggested that
levels of empathy declined as children grew older, especially amongst boys, but
the possibility that this was the result of their limited experience of success in
learning French cannot be excluded.

Theories from child development (Garvey, 1977, 1991, Harris, 1993) suggest
that the ability to empathise and to take another person's perspective is closely
linked to the ability of inductive reasoning and therefore increases with age.
Children need to apply inductive reasoning when learning rules and operations
but inductive reasoning is also said to be important in developing empathy:

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