The Teaching of English as a Second Language in Primary Schools

Abstract

For the last few years projects of foreign language instruction in primary schools have been planned and carried out by a growing number of school authorities. It would be wrong to maintain that such schemes are a completely new feature of primary education. ‘If we include … the older practices in private schools and the accepted practices in the developing countries of Africa and Asia, we will find that the teaching at the primary level is far more widespread than is commonly believed and it is ‘experimental’ only in the public educational systems of those countries in which the second-language start in the secondary school has been the rule.’1 Countries where a lingua franca is needed, bilingual areas, and smaller linguistic communities, are quite naturally expected to adopt a policy of early language learning. What is new in this context and particularly with regard to countries like Britain, France, Germany, or the United States, is the shift in emphasis which gives priority to the educational aspect and at the same time stresses the need to develop more effective methods of instruction. At any rate, this is the impression the reader gets from H. H. Stern's reports on the Hamburg conferences organized by the UNESCO Institute for Education in 1962 and 1966. In countries of a multilingual or bilingual type the motivational force of the surroundings, in which language learning takes place, is so strong that less refined techniques of teaching may still have certain chances of success. But this does not apply to the second group. It is easier to persuade pupils to tackle a second language and to keep them going, if their daily experience convinces them of the immediate surrender value of the matter learned, than to introduce such a language into an educational environment where the teachers cannot rely to that extent on advantages easily demonstrated in the community's life. Thus ways and means must be found to overcome the obstacles inherent in the learing situation, and there is no doubt that schools all over the world will profit from such progress in methodology. Therefore it is not lack of enthusiasm or the traditionalists horror of innovations, but a sober assessment of the present state of research when, for instance, the Plowden Report says with reference to the Leeds project; ‘for this, and other reasons, we hope that the experimental nature of the project will be recognized and that no attempt will be made to press further the teaching of second language in primary schools until the results of the experiment can be fully assessed.’2