ABSTRACT
We deal with children constantly at work and in our, perhaps, rare leisure hours, yet it is not difficult to forget what it feels like to be a child. Childhood pleasures, joys, pains and fears are similar to, but not the same as, those we experience in adulthood. We do not have the right to expect children to have the same sense of urgency about learning anything in the school context as teachers have to teach it. Children’s attitudes to learning a foreign language, both positive and negative, are influenced by many factors: age, peer-group pressure, school ethos, home background attitudes, teachers’ skills, the strong feeling that ‘everyone’ abroad speaks English, experience of travel abroad, job ambitions. More important than even these factors is the feeling that modern languages are the most difficult subject in the curriculum, offering pupils an opportunity to fail, to feel inadequate, to get it wrong. This must inevitably damage the self-esteem of many pupils, who, as they enter their teenage years already experience self-doubt and do not want more problems in their lives than they already have. So languages teachers have a big task on their hands. The most realistic approach teachers can take with this range of positive and negative factors in mind is to ‘grow’ their own attitudes in class and in school, using themselves, their teaching and interpersonal skills as the fertiliser for the pupils’ desire to learn or to take part in the lesson. They should certainly not take it for granted that children will arrive in the classroom with a strong positive attitude to foreign language learning. It may even be helpful for teachers to adopt a critical attitude to the tasks and expectations they create in their classrooms: this may lead to a healthy questioning of the work they prepare and the schemes of work they follow.
