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

tasks. They will depend less on immediate payoffs and are more likely to have
the ability to conceptualise long-term goals and objectives, adhere to these and
work towards these. Older learners who consciously decide to learn a language
are usually motivated and they possibly have some personal experience of the
target culture, its language and its speakers or simply see mastering a new
language as a challenge.

4.5 Foreign Language Aptitude

The chapter would not be complete without a brief consideration of the notion of
foreign language aptitude despite the controversy that surrounds the concept
and the tests set to measure it (Krashen & Terrell, 1988, Skehan 1988, Parry &
Stansfield, 1990). Nearly forty years ago Carroll and Sapon (1959) proposed
four components for foreign language aptitude:

phonetic coding ability - an ability to identify distinct sounds, to form
associations between those sounds and symbols representing them, and to
retain these associations;

grammatical sensitivity - the ability to re∞gnize the grammatical functions of
words (or other linguistic entities) in sentence structures;

rote learning ability for foreign language materials - the ability to Ieam
associations between sounds and meanings rapidly and efficiently, and to
retain these associations; and

inductive language learning ability - the ability to infer or induce the rules
governing a set of language materials, given samples of language materials
that permit such inferences. (Carroll, in Diller, 1981:105)

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