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

different age groups (9.5 to 10.5,14 to 15 and 18 to 26), elementary, junior high
and college students, to imitate the German sound system. Over three weeks
subjects received 10 sessions of 15 - 25 minutes of pre-taped instruction on
German phoneme pronunciation. Olson & Samuels found that:

"Contrary to common belief, on the post-test the junior high and college
groups were significantly better at pronunciation than the elementary group."
(Olson & Samuels, 1973: 263)

Ekstrand (1976) studied the learning of English by Swedish primary school
children aged 8 to 11. He found that during 18 months of tuition older children
consistently outperformed the younger ones in areas of pronunciation. He also
found, however, that younger immigrant children in Sweden performed better
than older children. These controversial findings, younger children seem to do
better in a target language environment while older children seem to do better in
the classroom, suggest that the acquisition of the phonological system of a
language within a school context might well be a different matter altogether than
the acquisition of that system in the target culture.

Under classroom conditions not all children achieve native-like accents, as
Jakobovits (1970) and Swain (1981) had already argued and as personal
practical experience has shown to be the case, especially in the multilingual
classroom where a high number of language pairs are present. Within the
classroom a number of variables take on importance, such as the language
learned, motivation and attitude towards that language as well as the teacher as

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