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

conditions, plenty of resources and materials, the intensity of the course made
possible through partial exclusion of other subjects from the timetable, the fact
that she herself was a native speaker and qualified teacher, the high IQ of the
children and not least their interest and enthusiasm which was partially due to
the special attention they were given:

"I was given optimum conditions to work in, such as one cannot normally hope
to find in primary schools, and it was therefore not surprising that we achieved
good results." (Kellermann, 1964: 3)

The Schools Council reported that 'encouraged by the success of the Leeds
experiment and by the interest which it had aroused the Nuffield Foundation
began discussions with the Ministry's Curriculum Study Group about the
establishment of a pilot project' (Schools Council, 1966:1). It remains difficult to
understand, however, how such a 'special' project could have served as a
springboard for a national large-scale project with a wide range of children in a
wide range of schools. A second experiment carried out by Kellermann in 1964
yielded quite different results. This experiment, where French was taught to
children of mixed ability by 'competent' primary teachers, gave rise to a number
of important questions, not least concerning the suitability of the audio-visual
methodology in teaching a foreign language to young children. Despite
KeIIermann¹S concerns, the audio-visual methodology was widely and
unquestioningly adopted during the Pilot Scheme. How this might have affected
the final outcome of the Pilot Scheme will be discussed in Chapter Three in the
context of a review of outcomes from the current Scottish National Pilot.

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