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

Ellis (1996) points to the difficulties in interviewing individual learners who might
simply say what they think the researcher wants to hear. However, this was
deemed a minor 'disadvantage' in comparison to what was to be gained.

Slightly more problematic might have been Ellis' second point that interview
techniques can 'reveal only those factors of which the learner is conscious'
(Ellis,1996: 101). Yet, it was felt that interviews would nevertheless provide
valuable insights into children's perception of the learning process, although
these might, at times, be incomplete.

5.4.1 Question Formation

Semi-structured interviews which would provide children with a frame for
responses were deemed to be the best way forward. As suggested by Cohen &
Manion (1994: 93), to begin with subsidiary topics for the interviews were
identified. In order to avoid any bias, a question format was then chosen which
would be as open-ended as possible, unlikely to provide any clues as to
potential responses and a basic set of questions was selected. These were to
allow children to express their own viewpoint, to tell what they really wanted to
tell and what mattered to them in their early foreign language learning
experience, such as the things they liked or disliked about learning French,
what they thought they found easy or difficult and how they generally felt about
learning French. Individual questions were trialled whilst working alongside
children during lessons. A copy of the interview questions can be found in
Appendix B. How interviews were conducted, transcribed and analysed will be
discussed further after the analysis Offindings from lesson observations.

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