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

does not bother about putting his hand up in French, unlike in other subjects.
S∞tt also says that he enjoys French a lot although this did not seem to be the
case in lessons where he seemed to be one of the children that did not enjoy
learning French and did not really get involved. Scott was the last child to be
interviewed and it is possible that he would not have wanted to do the interview
had he not been the only one to do so.

5.11 Findings from Interviews with Children in School One

5.11.1 General Listening Skills

It became apparent during the interviews that a number of children simply did
not listen carefully to the questions posed by the interviewer. Some, for
example, started to talk about what they generally liked and disliked such as
video games, sports or animals when they were clearly asked to talk about their
experiences in the French lessons. Interviews generally started with the writer
'setting the scene' in saying something like 'we are going to talk about the
French lessons and you learning French, the things you like and the things you
might not like, for example'. A number of children clearly focused only on the
second part of this statement and did not realise that their likes and dislikes
were to refer to learning French. This might suggest that these children had
difficulties in 'dis-embedding' language and in using language clues rather than
contextual clues in clarifying meaning. Focused listening might have also been
a problem for some. Those who seemed to find it difficult to listen on a one to
one basis might also find listening in class problematic. The importance of
being able to listen to instruction in formal learning situations was discussed in

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