New Brunswick - post 2

In this second bit, I will tackle the vexed question of teaching FL at Primary School level. I will begin by declaring an interest ; it is my job to train trainee primary-school teachers within the French educational system to teach English. This does not mean, however, that I am a fervent adept of Primary School Foreign Language Learning (PSFLL) - as you will probably gather from what follows, I am undecided as to its virtues.

One may justify PSFLL in a number of ways. One, based upon the dominant model of language acquisition, is that children are able to call upon skills that adolescents and adults. There is some evidence to suggest that there is a 'critical period' for language acquisition, and that once an individual has passed a given stage of development - which may be the age of puberty, but which may occur as early as 7 or 8 - she loses her capacity to acquire a first language. A case in point would be the woman known in the literature is Chelsea, who, diagnosed as mentally subnormal as a child, was discovered - at the age of 32 - to be afflicted with a grave hearing deficit. Chelsea is now able to hear, with the help of an apparatus, but she has been unable to acquire full language competence.

From this, it is a short step to positing that children do not learn an FL in the same way as adults - that they absorb it with greater ease and accuracy. If this is the case, then it would appear to be foolish to put off the age at which one begins to learn an FL until after the age of puberty, by which time, the original language acquisition skill has been lost.

Another argument simply points to the fact that one of the only fairly solid findings of SLA research is that the more hours you spend studying a foreign language, ceterus paribus, the better you learn it. If children begin to learn an FL at primary school, then they will spend longer on studying it, and so will naturally end up with greater competence.

There are, however, a number of arguments against PSFLL. The most cogent of these is simply that primary school teachers are not qualified to teach an FL. Most of them have had no occasion to use an FL since leaving school themselves, and many feel extremely inadequate when faced with the need to supervise their charges' language learning. It might be thought that, in these circumstances, one should call upon specialist teachers; this however has proven - in France, at least - cumbersome and unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. It also goes very much against the conception that Primary school teachers have of their relationship to their classes.

Nevertheless, PSFLL has been tried in a number of countries. In many of these, it is quite obviously successful - the Scandinavian countries, and Luxembourg are typical examples. However, in those countries where the mother tongue is one of the world languages, experience has not always proven positive. Thus, for example, in France, it has been found that secondary school teachers are often far from impressed by the differences between those children who have had some tuition and those who have not, reporting that the differences between the two groups had largely disappeared by the beginning of the second term at secondary school.

In England, an experiment in teaching primary level French was brought to an end in 1975, after ten years, subsequent to the publication of the Burstall Report, which found, among other things, that the main effect of this teaching upon a large number of children - particularly the boys - had been to turn them off language learning, so that one of the attractions of secondary school was the opportunity to drop the FL. This was particularly true of the less able students. Of those who did continue, although on leaving school, they were superior in oral work - both comprehension and production - than children who had had the same amount of teaching but who had started later, they were inferior in writing and in reading. By the end of the experiment, secondary-school teachers and heads, who had been initially favourable, had become disillusioned, and felt that the children were often hindered in their progress, having learnt to function communicatively, without analysing the language they were using, which was thus reduced to a series of formulae.

It is possible that the negative results of the English experiment, and the disappointment of some secondary-school teachers in France, may be explained by a failure to enunciate clearly the objectives of PSFLL and a refusal to recognize the specificity of PS approaches.

A question that I shall ask, then is whether, to the extent that the experiment reported on by Lightbown suggests a way of sidestepping the problem of primary-school teachers' linguistic competence, it offers a model for PSFLL. We will also need to ask whether the skills acquired through this approach do leave traces which can be measured in the language behaviour of the children as they go through secondary school and beyond.

You will find the third post here.