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

specific language and one can once again only speculate what learning
outcomes both linguistic and affective might have been had children been
learning a different language. The issue of choice of language is a ∞mplex one
in an English-speaking context. It has already been reported that in the Scottish
National Pilot a range Oflanguages, French, German, Spanish and Italian were
introduced but children nevertheless focused on one language only. The above
comments made by children in ∞mbination with earlier discussions on
language pairs would strongly suggest that at primary school focus should not
be on one language exclusively for both cognitive and affective reasons. Focus
on one language has the potential of producing early 'failures' and therefore
has the potential of being counterproductive.

6.6 Individual Children's Profiles

It becomes clear from the above comments that there is great variety between
individual children's responses to the learning process, their individual strengths
and weaknesses and their needs and interests. The profiles of individual
children cannot ∞ver every aspect and are therefore not intended as an exact
replica of a child. In the interest of accessibility of findings only fourteen
children were chosen for profiles. The majority of these children were
chosen on the basis of how comprehensive their answers were and on the
consistency across the answers they had given. However, the profiles also
include children from a range Ofabilities, high, average and low as defined by
their class teachers (not the French teacher) and a couple of profiles are
therefore rather 'short'.

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