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

It was therefore decided that findings from classroom observations should be
supplemented by interviews and questionnaires to account for those factors
which might not be readily observable.

5.2.2 Choice of Schools

The evaluation of the Scottish National Pilot was based on two case studies
which ’had a lot in common with other projects and schools and only showed a
few characteristics that made them substantially different' (Low et al., 1995).
In choosing schools for the purpose of this study a number of considerations
were taken into account. It was important that class sizes should be close to
the national average, that there should be school and teacher co-operation and
the opportunity for long-term classroom observation. Equally important,
however, were the context-specific variables defining a school. To avoid
'sample bias' the two schools chosen for this study are representative of two
distinctly different learning environments each drawing their intake from a very
different socio-economic and linguistic background. These schools were
chosen to investigate what might be common and recurrent themes across
contexts as well as to identify those factors that might be unique to a specific
context and individual children. No special groups were created for the
purpose of this study and the children in School One were aged eight to nine
and the children in School Two were aged ten to eleven. Both schools will be
descπbed in more detail, School One in the following pages, School Two at the
start of Chapter Six.

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