ABSTRACT
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. 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. The positive relevance of new developments in language teaching had 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. Linguistic and cultural objectives may overlap, but they remain very different as far as their respective conceptual frameworks are concerned. Primary curriculum reflects the problematical relationship between French and much forward-looking primary practice.
