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

As in School One, despite a 'near-native' model and a native-speaker model
present in one class, pronunciation was often incorrect and did ncrt resemble the
model given. As in School One some children became very 'skilled' at hiding
behind sloppy pronunciation, little difference was made between dhien/chat, for
example, between je∕j'ai or un∕une although the teacher tended to encourage
children to improve on this. On one occasion, for example, children listened to
a tape and tried to identify masculine and feminine genders. Such explicit focus
on the structural properties of language and seeing language written down
seemed to improve children's correct use of language, gender in this case.
There would seem to be much scope for further research into the source of
pronunciation errors in the multilingual classroom and the need for corrective
feedback as suggested by Bley-Vroman (1989) and Schachter (1990) has
already been emphasised in previous chapters.

As in School One, while some children did 'notice' mistakes either their own or
those of their peers, others could not see 'anything wrong' with what they had
said even after errors had been pointed out to them, nor did they remember
feedback and corrections. Given the choice between a ∞rrect and an incorrect
utterance, many chose the incorrect version although they had heard and
repeated the ∞rrect version again and again over time. Classroom
observations in School Two also suggested that children varied in their affective
response to error correction. While some did not regard the teacher’s usually
very sensitive feedback as personal criticism or reflection on themselves, others
were quick to go into 'a sulk' and withdrew from classroom proceedings.

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