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

Does 'different' necessarily mean worse? And what does it mean to have
near-native like or native-like competence?

Adding to this confusion in the use Ofterminology and question formation is the
fact that research findings from one ∞ntext are often uncritically transferred to a
different context without taking into account context-specific variables or
'without regard to their particular conditions of validity' (Widdowson, 1990: 26).
Many of the studies on age in language learning were carried out in a first or
second language acquisition context and a major part of the literature on age
assumes a second language environment. Findings from these contexts are
often transferred to the learning of a foreign language in the classroom where
quite clearly different variables are at play and where, as Hatch (1978b) pointed
out, the application of results from second language acquisition research often
involves 'leaps in logic'. On the other hand, 'extremist' and 'exclusive' views
have often led to what might be valuable and relevant findings from second
language acquisition research being ignored in discussions of classroom foreign
language learning (Lightbown, 1985). Any discussion of the age factor in
language learning, however, which does not take context-specific variables into
account is likely to be of little value:

"Generalizations about the optimum age that fail to take context into account
are almost certain to be false." (Jakobovits, 1970: 74)

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