Children Learning French

An Attempt at First Principles

Barbara Rapaport, David Westgate

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138594449
• eBook ISBN: 9780429950322
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Is the learning of a second language best begun in the junior school? Originally published in 1974, the authors draw upon studies of language learning and upon developmental characteristics of children, relating them to second language learning, in order to assess the appropriateness of French to the curriculum. The possibilities and limitations of the task confronting the child are explored.

The book is a practical one with many references to classroom organisation and teaching techniques. The restrictions of imitative learning are relegated to their limited place, and a higher aim is suggested, that of meaningful and productive language use.

1 Introduction: aims of the study

A decade has now gone by since the first attempts to pioneer primary French. Developments in that time have been encouraged by a variety of factors that range from personal enthusiasms (which may of course be justification enough) to social and political ideals. Such ideals influence the world in which today's children will become adult and rightly play their part in shaping the schools' curricula. At the same time educationists have come to recognize more and more that the fullest preparation for adulthood involves the most complete recognition possible of what is educationally appropriate to children at each successive stage of their development. The educational needs of children in the junior school, however, have not been the starting-point for the thought and planning of primary French. Curriculum innovation does of course come from many sources, but what is serious, in the present authors' view, is the continuing tendency to ignore this problem or to shirk the difficult task of working upon it.

Primary school French teachers, or those who are thinking of introducing French, consequently cannot have access to reference works dealing with this subject in the same light as that in which the rest of the curriculum is to be seen. They may refer to general educational literature for guidance but will inevitably find it hard to apply this to a specialism like French. The only directly relevant literature is likely to be the teacher's manual of the chosen teaching materials, or a limited range of books that only set out to deal superficially with the practical significance of, for instance, psychological or developmental theory. The practical guides are gradually being supplemented, it is true, by the results of the Nuffield / Schools Council pilot scheme as evaluated by the N.F.E.R. But there remains a shortage of works which take account of characteristics peculiar to French and which see these in relation to educational principles validated in other fields.

This is the context in which the present work has been conceived.

We have therefore not set out to produce a methodological handbook. We agree that such a work, with detailed ideas for the classroom as its raison d'être, would meet a current need. Our intention is to fill another gap, however, perhaps even to provide a firmer basis upon which more effective practical suggestions might then be built. We intend to seek this basis in a fresh look at some major assumptions that underlie present theory and practice, and hope to present some guidelines for further thought and action.

Our approach begins with an attempt to define some relevant aspects of various fields of study. We have drawn upon:

studies in primary education generally;
child development theory;
theoretical studies of linguistic and intellectual development
in particular.

An attempt is made to evaluate the significance of such insights as these provide and to assess possible implications for primary school children learning French.

In the second place we have tried to pin-point some practical consequences of current practice for the children and their schools. By means of structured interviews with teachers and children in a number of schools, we have assessed the impact and some of the more subtle side effects which the inclusion of French may have in a whole educational context.

We have included references to works in which the ideas discussed may be explored in greater depth. Reference has in the main been restricted to reasonably accessible sources. Similarly an attempt has been made to avoid the obscurity of too much technical jargon, though it has been difficult on the other hand to avoid over-simplifying. Our guiding principle has been to bear in mind that students, teachers and others interested in this field, will not need the discussion watered down but will be grateful if it is presented in clear terms and with plenty of concrete examples.

Our wish, therefore, is to make accessible some basic thoughts upon primary school French and for these to be discussed more widely than has hitherto been the case.

2 The evolution of French as a component of the primary curriculum

Although French is not yet taught to a majority of junior school children, that situation is already in sight.

A large contributor to these numbers has been the Nuffield/Schools Council pilot scheme, the institution and development of which have already been well documented. It is as well to recall here, however, the intended experimental nature of this scheme. Indeed it has been described as 'one of the most thorough-going attempts ever made to investigate the problems of language teaching at the primary stage in the normal setting of ordinary primary schools in one country'.¹ Nevertheless the very existence of such a large-scale experiment has constituted in itself a de facto introduction of the subject into a significant nucleus of schools.

So great has been the influence of this fact, and of the ideas and enthusiasm behind it, that many schools and authorities outside the scheme have gone ahead with primary French, using either Nuffield materials or others of their own choice. In this way they have anticipated that favourable conclusions would be drawn from the official scheme. An important factor has been the heavy investment involved in teacher training (initial and in-service), in C.C.T.V., and also in the production and purchase of teaching materials. This growth continues in a context of debate concerning supposed advantages and possible disadvantages deriving from the introduction of a foreign language into a child's educational experience some three years earlier than was traditionally the case in the state system.

Some strands of this debate must now be identified.

There are real problems involved, and it would not be rational either to dismiss them or to consider them insuperable until more evaluation has been completed. Critics of primary French have often failed to distinguish the bad practice no doubt encountered in some places from the positive possibilities being realized in others through teachers' skill and enthusiasm. Neither a good teacher nor an individual subject of the curriculum can subsist in isolation; inevitably both function within a total educational context. It is no coincidence that the most clearly stated reservations about primary French are to be found in publications concerned with the wider field of primary education as a whole (and also among secondary language teachers), while the greatest optimism is shown by linguists, primary language teachers and advisers.

Thus the Plowden Report deemed it 'unfortunate that many schools and areas. . . have chosen to add French to the curriculum without ensuring reasonable condition for success' (para. 617).² The Committee urged patience and caution; it noted the interest aroused by the experiment but 'retain [ed] certain reservations about it' (para. 618). These are by now familiar. They concern, for example, the need for systematic planning and collaboration of all concerned, and particularly those problems arising in the schools over specialization, the possible clash with less formal teaching procedures, and some courses 'which are completely out of harmony with good primary practice' (para. 617). Plowden showed itself less reserved, however, than its predecessor of 1959 which had referred to French as 'something which in the majority of schools could not, in present circumstances, be well done and which might damage any future interest and competence in the foreign language which is attempted'.³ Also seven years later Plowden acknowledged a 'complete change' in the climate of public opinion, resulting from more foreign travel and pro-European feeling, plus a growing desire to democratize the cultural advantages attaching to language study.

The Report might also have mentioned the equally influential change in attitude towards language teaching which was already being felt. Certainly in a decade or so language teaching has been greatly expanded. The tentative introduction of French into the primary curriculum is just one example of the spread of opportunity for foreign language study to a new group of learners. In the secondary schools the opportunity has been extended across the ability range. More and more adults, too, are now following courses designed to meet their very specific needs. What these diverse groups have in common is their exposure to a completely new methodology. Audio-visual or audio-lingual courses, language laboratories and other aids to learning, are all evidence of changed attitudes to the tasks of teaching and learning foreign languages. The new approaches reject the traditional procedure of beginning with grammatical rules and applying them to the problems of translating English sentences into the foreign language. Indeed translation and the use of English are avoided as far as possible, and writing is delayed until oral skills are well established. Instead, the new approaches commonly take as their starting-point idiomatic examples of the living language. These 'sentence patterns', as they are often called, are imitated orally and repeated until they can be considered automatic. They are also met again and slightly modified in drills and other exercises. The intention is that the learner should in this way develop a feel for the basic structural patterns of the language: with an increasing vocabulary it would then be an effective instrument for communication.

Underlying these practical changes have been developments of at least three kinds. In the first place the science of linguistics has claimed to provide a more precise analysis of the structure and dynamics of language generally, as well as of particular languages for teaching. On this basis, the linguistic content of teaching materials is said to be more scientifically selected: it can be more subtly graded, for instance, in the phonetic problems it poses, so that difficulties can be met in a controlled sequence. In the same way the grammatical content is determined not by the desire to present whole categories at once (e.g., the conditional tense), but by the selection of particular structures (e.g., 'Je voudrais . . .') which can be usefully introduced in a graded progression. Thus the very notion of grammar has been completely revised, as well as its role in the learning process.

The second development has been in the field of psychology, where behaviourist learning theory has been influential. The notion of language use as a set of behavioural responses to be made automatic or habitual has led to a stress upon 'overlearning' by means of repetition and drills.

Both the linguistic and the psychological factors, however, have been made even more influential by the third, a technological one – improvements in the quality of soundrecording and the availability of reasonably priced tape recorders.

It has been claimed that these factors are together responsible for raising the business of language teaching from the level of a traditional craft to that of an applied science backed by its own technology.⁴ They have not, however, raised it above criticism. Doubt was cast upon the effectiveness of many of the new features by W. Rivers, for example, as early as 1964.⁵ Since then more fundamental questions of principle have become apparent, with particular implications for primary education.

Yet the positive relevance of new developments in language teaching had at first seemed clear for the primary school. Work in the field of child development had shown young children unable to make formal, logical deductions, and in consequence presumably unable to profit from methods based on grammatical analysis. At the same time evidence from bilingualism seemed to imply an evident capacity to acquire foreign languages before the age of secondary schooling. If in the light of new linguistic knowledge basic parts of the language to be learned could be more accurately prescribed, and if objectives were restricted at first to purely oral skills, then surely the task was possible.

Other factors made it seem desirable too. Probably the most potent of these lie outside the strictly educational sphere but impinge quite directly upon it; they are social, political and economic. H. H. Stern points out that these factors, and not linguists' dreams, give rise to the present world-wide need for bilingualism or multilingualism. He continues: 'Linguists and language teachers are themselves among the greatest sceptics concerning this demand.'⁶ However, these people cannot be blamed for doing their utmost to meet the demand which has so enhanced their status and esteem. And the advantages deriving from multilingual competence at both personal and national levels are now rarely called in question, even if they are more rarely achieved.

It would be wrong to assume that the English pilot scheme owes its existence to these factors alone. The pioneering work done in Leeds, for instance, pre-dates the influential UNESCO conference of 1963 which provided the substance for Stern's book. Nevertheless it is fair to suppose that without these wider semi-official pressures those who wished to extend the teaching of foreign language to primary school children would not have enjoyed the support they have had at all levels, through, e.g., the Nuffield Foundation, Schools Council, H.M. Inspectorate, N.F.E.R., L.E.A. advisers, head-teachers, etc. It is presumably also just this demand which has at least temporarily outstripped the supply of capable teachers and created the need to intensify teacher training programmes at both initial and in-service stages.⁷

Such a general context has influenced and facilitated the evolution of aims in language teaching generally. G. E. Perren puts it thus:

Expressed aims often reflect a generalized attitude towards foreign languages held by the society in which they are to be taught. Nevertheless since aims are formulated by educationists and language teachers, it is resonable to assume that they should be capable of translation into terms of practical objectives to be achieved in the classroom.⁸

The main modern development has been that the mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: aims of the study
• 2 The evolution of French as a component of the primary curriculum
• 3 Relevant educational factors at the junior stage
• 4 The significance of language development
• 5 Intellectual development at the junior stage
• 6 Schools visited: an educational perspective
• 7 Summary and synthesis
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index