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

the words’? The 'high ability¹ boy who is enthus astic about learning French,
who goes to France a lot and would like to do more reading, writing and
homework? The 'low ability' boy who says he likes French, that it is easy and
fun but who kept disrupting others and spent some time outside the classroom?
The remainder of this chapter will summarise the findings from the two schools
before some tentative conclusions will be drawn.

6.7 Summary and Discussion of the Findings from both Schools
6.7.1 Linguistic Considerations

In both schools children seemed to experience similar problems. Dealing with
language at the sentence level, especially, seemed to cause problems in both
comprehension and production as did adapting pre-rehearsed language chunks
to new situations or to create novel utterances. These findings seem in line with
findings from the Scottish National Pilot as reported in Low et al. (1995).

Findings from other studies suggest that many of the problems the young
children encountered are also shared with older beginning learners of French
such as gender concord or the production of'mixed chunks' (see Mitchell &
Martin, 1997, Myles, Hooper & Mitchell, 1998, for example).

Particular problems seemed to arise in the area of responding to a variety of
questions or to a change in questions on personal information such as name
and age, for example, although these had been frequently practised in both
schools. Much confusion surrounded the manipulation of language from
question to answer and vice versa. It is possible that a focus on the third

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