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

CHAPTER FIVE

Case Study One - School One
5.1 Introduction

Chapter Five and Chapter Six focus on two case studies carried out in two
primary schools in England where French is taught. Findings from classroom
observations, interviews with children and questionnaires as well as the 'profiles'
of individual children will be presented and discussed. It is hoped that close
observation of what individual children are like in the foreign language
classroom, their views on learning French and their concerns will, if not
determine, at least inform further policy and practice, starting from where
children are likely to be rather than from where it is often thought that they
should be. Any account is necessarily a Simplifcation of ∞mplex classroom
processes and a small-scale study such as this one cannot match projects on a
national scale and the conclusions from these projects. However, this does not
mean that the case studies will remain at the level Ofdescriptions and a number
of tentative conclusions will be drawn. It is hoped that the response to and
interpretation of the data will allow readers to judge the implications for
themselves and for their own specific contexts.

5.2 Method

In order to 'explore and understand better¹ (Block, 1996: 74) how children
respond to learning a foreign language, in this case French, at primary school
and to provide some insights into their experiences and perceptions of the
learning process, it was decided that a case study would be the appropriate way

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