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

It might therefore be more appropriate to talk about stages in children's foreign
language development rather than about learning outcomes in French as such.
The data collected does not allow the writer to judge if, when, how and why
some children might have progressed from these 'mixed' chunks of language.

What could be observed, however, was the inability of some children to
memorise patterns or chunks of language, to recall and use these even in
∞ntexts where it would have been appropriate to do so. As was discussed
earlier, not seeing language written down might have prevented these children
from making much progress.

During pairwork, when asked to practise questions and answers, children
generally did not use longer, structured utterances but one or two vocabulary
items only. When longer utterances were expressed these tended to be
pre-fabricated patterns which showed no creative reconstruction or adaptation
to the context. Thus some children simply repeated the items of information
g ven by another child without adjusting this information, such as age or where
they lived, to their own circumstances. Only very few children made any
attempt at manipulating language items. Findings from Scotland reported in
ChapterThree had already suggested that children tended to limit their
utterances to single items Ofvocabulary or prefabricated chunks of language
and did not attempt to manipulate language in any meaningful way. However,
it would seem that the use of single items of vocabulary also occurs amongst
adult acquirers of French in natural ∞ntexts. In the European Science

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