Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Age and language teaching
How should a language teacher take the student’s age into account? One question
is when L2 teaching should start. This also involves how long the learners are
going to be studying. If they are intending to spend many years learning the sec-
ond language, they might as well start as children rather than as adults since they
will probably end up better speakers. If they are going to learn the second lan-
guage for a few years and then drop it, like the majority of learners perhaps, there
is an advantage for adults, who would reach a higher standard during the same
period. But, as Bernard Spolsky (1989a) points out, ‘Educational systems usually
arrive first at a decision of optimal learning age on political or economic grounds
and then seek justification for their decision.’ When to teach children a second
language is seldom decided by language teachers or L2 learning experts.
A related question is whether the use of teaching methods should vary according
to the age of the students. At particular ages students prefer particular methods.
Teenagers may dislike any technique that exposes them in public; role play and sim-
ulation are in conflict with their adolescent anxieties. Adults can feel they are not
learning properly in play-like situations and prefer a conventional, formal style of
teaching. Adults learn better than children from the ‘childish’ activities of total phys-
ical response (Asher and Garcia, 1969) – if you can get them to join in! Age is by no
means crucial to L2 learning itself. Spolsky (1989a) describes three conditions for L2
learning related to age:
1 ‘Formal’ classroom learning requires ‘skills of abstraction and analysis’. That is to
say, if the teaching method entails sophisticated understanding and reasoning
by the student, as for instance a traditional grammar-translation method, then
it is better for the student to be older.