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

and that 'the difficulty of recognising and recalling gender for the learner on a
"drip-feed diet" in school arises from the paucity of gender clues given in the
classroom context'. However, as was stated earlier in Chapter Three, the
problems English-speaking children experience with learning the French gender
system would seem to be a commonly reported beginners' problems. Learners
of French of all ages seem to find gender concord difficult. Allen, Swain, Harley
& Cummins discuss the development of proficiency in French in immersion
contexts and state that:

"The highest proportion of error was observed in frequently used (i.e.
unavoidable) grammatical features such as gender, articles and verbs."
(Allenetal., 1990: 67)

The problems the children in the case study experienced with gender therefore
do not provide evidence in support of any particular age being 'better¹ or ^,worse'
in this respect. However, problems with gender also give rise to a number of
questions on feedback to error for example, whether, when, how and why,
errors should be corrected and on methodology. Hawkins (1981) stated that
most teachers would agree that uncertainty about gender in French is a major
cause of loss of confidence and that children need all the help they can get. It
would therefore seem important to re-emphasise the role of written language in
supporting memory, in reinforcing learning and in encouraging progress.

Problems were also noticed in relation to question and answer work and the
structural properties of language. In answer to the question 'Quel age as-tu?',

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