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

teacheris questions whereas others never once volunteered an answer and,
even when asked directly by the teacher, did not respond. It was interesting to
notice in School Two that a French native-speaking child who had arrived only a
few months previously with no English and who was now acquiring English in a
'natural' context, had 'a go' most of the time whether questions or answers were
required in English or French. He simply used what he could of either
language.

Homework, although given sparingly, was generally greeted by children with 'Oh
no', suggesting that the majority were not prepared to invest extra time learning
French. However, this reluctance to do 'extra' work could have applied to other
subjects as well and, as was stated earlier, the French lesson was the last
lesson of the day and this might well have affected to some extent levels of
enthusiasm as well as degrees of involvement.

6.3.3 Attention Spans

It was already stated in Chapter Five that levels of attention are difficult to judge
(Allright & Bailey, 1991) but as far as this was observable, attention spans
seemed to range ∞nsiderably amongst children from the very attentive to the
withdrawn. There were also those children who spent a lesson or part of a
lesson outside the classroom because of bad behaviour and the number of
those who missed a lesson for various reasons was considerable. In School
Two many children found it difficult to pay attention to what was going on in the
lesson. Some found it difficult to simply look at the board when asked to do so

320

<<   317   318   319   320   321   322   323   >>

More intriguing information