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

and some children, through their body language, quite clearly imparted a sense
of boredom. There were a number of children who, for whatever reason, had to
be reprimanded or moved several times during a lesson. Some showed little or
no interest throughout the term and were almost permanently off task. Working
in silence, for example during a tape exercise or during copying, proved to be
very difficult for some. Due to the very short attention spans amongst some
children, practice of language material, necessary for patterns to be
established, became at times problematic.

The gap between those that were able to work in whole class contexts, in
groups, in pairs or on their own without disrupting the work of others and those
that found this difficult was considerable. Holmes comments on the differences
in turn-taking skills amongst young children:

"Observation of eight to nine-year-olds in classrooms provide abundant
evidence that, even after three or four years of primary schooling, children still
have difficulty in refraining from calling out responses to teachers' questions..."
(Holmes, 1978: 141)

For those children who experienced difficulties in these areas,' younger* did not
seem to be 'better* as they lacked most of the basic personal and social skills
necessary for formal foreign language learning.

It was stated in Chapter Four that attention spans improve with age (Harris,
1993). On the surface, however, the children in School One seemed to be the

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