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

clearly proved to be very different issues and despite much 'attentiveness' and
enthusiasm amongst children the available input was not always ∞nverted into
intake and what might have been 'taken in' was frequently forgotten.

Establishing the precise reasons why this should have been the case with
individual children, however, is not within the s∞pe of this thesis.

5.8.5 Learning Strategies

The 'good language learner* is allegedly a 'willing guesser^, (Rubin, 1975,
Naiman et al.,1978). Lesson observations showed that while many children
were quite willing to guess and to have a go, they also tended to guess ^,wildly'.
On a number of occasions children offered the name of a place in answer to a
question on time or a time in answer to a question on place and numbers were
frequently given instead of places or names. Such 'wild' guesses also
accidentally increased the number of instances of incorrect language input the
class experienced. It also became apparent during observations that some
children employed 'avoidance strategies', that they ducked out of the teacher's
attention when the class was asked a question, chose not to respond or
responded non-verbally. Subsequent conversations with children revealed that
some did not respond although they knew the answer to a question.

A surprising number of children also thought that they 'knew¹ when they quite
clearly did not. A chorus response to the teacher's question would often be in
the affirmative when a follow up question by the researcher revealed that some

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