ABSTRACT
Modern foreign languages (MFL) is the only National Curriculum subject excluded from the primary school. Pupils learn all other curriculum subjects from the age of 5 but modern languages provision is delayed until the age of 11. One of the main reasons for this is the formally accepted view that there are insufficient teachers with appropriate expertise to teach it (Dearing, 1993). As the Modern Languages Working Party pointed out in 1990, ‘Fullscale teaching of foreign languages in primary schools…is not at present possible, not because children at this age cannot successfully learn a language but because very few teachers in primary schools are equipped to teach it’ (DES, 1990:5).
