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

Nineteen thought that French would be 'hard' or a 'challenge'. Only five children
thought that learning French would be boring or not much fun and only one boy
thought that French was a waste of time as he would not need it

The 87 children who had done 'some' French at primary school presented a
slightly different picture. Comments were on the whole positive although the
number of negative comments was greater than in the above group as was the
number ofthose who thought that French was 'hard'. A list can be found in
Appendix H. Those children who commented along the lines of 'didn't like it',
'the teacher did not teach us anything', 'not shoor^, [sic], 'boring', 'a waste of
time', 'rubbish', 'done it for a year and it's rubbish', are at best disaffected and at
worst alienated, possibly because they were ill-equipped to make sense of the
experience in the first place. For those children the early start might well have
been counterproductive. Brumfit states that two surveys of the age factor in
language acquisition (Harley, 1986 and Singleton, 1989) while not in theoretical
agreement on what exactly the advantages of an early start might be,
nevertheless suggest that an early start 'certainly need not do any harm'
(Brumfit, 1991). The comments made by some of the children would seem to
question such an assumption.

It has already been stated that one would expect a degree of enthusiasm
amongst younger children as it would seem natural that they should respond
positively to a novel experience. However, these ∞mments also suggest that

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