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

also better in a school context. Following two years of 15-20 minutes of French
each day, third and fourth graders in America were judged by teachers to have
better pronunciation and intonation standards than the older children leading
Dunkel & Pillet to the conclusion that achievements in pronunciation was 'the
most rewarding aspect of the elementary school programme'.

Tahta, Wood & Loewenthal (1981 b) studied the ability of 5 to 15 year old
monolingual English school children to imitate French and Armenian
phonological patterns and found that where the acquisition of the second
language had begun before the age of six, speech production was accent-free.
When acquisition began between the ages of 7 and 11, speech was generally
accent-free whereas after the age of 12 accents were rather marked. However,
this study also suggested that age-related changes in the ability to replicate
foreign language sounds may differ for intonation and pronunciation:

"For pronunciation, there is a slight uneven but basically steady linear decline
over the whole age-range studied (5-15). For intonation there is a marked and
rapid drop from 8-11, with 5-8 year olds showing comparable, good abilities
to replicate intonation, and 11-15 showing comparable, poor abilities to do so,
though with a slight superiority of the older subjects in this age range.

It is, however, worth stressing that all the adolescents (and younger children)
could replicate foreign intonation adequately, given a sufficient amount of
exposure and practice, and given that they had nothing else to ∞ncentrate
on." (Tahta, Wood & Loewenthal, 1981b: 367)

However, other studies have produced some contradictory evidence. Olson &
Samuels (1973) investigated, under laboratory conditions, the ability of three

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