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

was therefore deemed preferable despite reservations expressed by some
researchers:

"The accounts that typically emerge from participant observations are often
described as subjective, biased, impressionistic, idiosyncratic and lacking in
the precise quantifiable measures that are the hallmark of survey research and
experimentation." (Cohen & Manion, 1995:110)

Van Lier makes the salient point that what cannot be counted or formally
measured is not necessarily of less importance:

"The category-coding tradition is inescapably locked into a circularity, due to
the selection of categories that are deemed relevant. The criteria for their
selection must come from some theory or ideology, as mentioned before.

They must also be held to be clear and unambiguous, directly observable and
countable, and this inevitably excludes from the sphere of operations some of
the most interesting features of classroom interaction...Finally, when the time
for counting arises, it is unquestioningly assumed that more (of whatever it is
that is called relevant) is necessarily better." (Van Lier, 1988: 43)

It was decided that within the context of the primary school classroom
'subjective impressions of a complete experience may be more valuable than
objective measurement of a small and unimportant part' (Brumfit & Mitchell,
1990: 13).

Chaudron (1988:180) discusses a number of classroom interaction studies and
stresses the importance of 'baseline units of observations' in such studies.

However, the case studies presented here were explorative. Systematic

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