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

development might vary between individual children as studies by Wells (1981,
1985) had shown, the route would seem to remain largely the same. Language
structures and patterns are developed in an orderly and systematic way with an
identifiable sequence of stages or 'speech milestones' (Brown, 1973). All
children, Whatevertheir background, seem to progress through the same initial
stages in their language development. By the age of six months most children
'coo' and 'babble' and by the age often months most use single words such as
'mama' and 'dada'. Children start to produce sequences of sounds and they
start using more words (although research on 'variability' suggests that there
might be some individual differences with some children using language chunks
early in their development). By the age of 4 most children have mastered the
phonological system of their first language. By the age of 5 they have acquired
most morphological and syntactical rules of their language used in speech
although they are likely to continue to learn more complex or cognitively
demanding structures such as the passive form (see Chomsky, C., 1969).

Children are also likely to have some notion of Sociolinguistic rules as
manifested in their changing roles and voices during play. Linguistic stages
linked to approximate ages would therefore seem relevant for those aspects of
spoken first language development which are dependent on innate factors.
Other aspects of language development, such as lexical development, would
seem to depend much more on the environment and first language skills such
as reading and writing need to be taught and therefore treated differently.

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