Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

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Box 8.2 Aptitude for L2 learning
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Most aptitude tests predict success in L2 academic classrooms.
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Aptitude breaks down into different factors, such as phonemic coding 
ability and memory.

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8.4 Age: are young L2 learners better than old
learners?
Age: are young L2 learners better than old learners? 147
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What do you think is the best age for learning a new language? Why?
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How would your teaching of, say, the present tense, differ according to
whether you were teaching children or adults?
Focusing questions
critical period hypothesis: the claim that human beings are only capable of
learning language between the age of 2 years and the early teens
immersion teaching: teaching the whole curriculum through the second 
language, best known from experiments in Canada
Keywords
Undoubtedly, children are popularly believed to be better at learning second lan-
guages than adults. People always know one friend or acquaintance who started
learning English as an adult and never managed to learn it properly, and another
who learnt it as a child and is indistinguishable from a native. Linguists as well as
the general public often share this point of view. Chomsky (1959) has talked of the
immigrant child learning a language quickly, while ‘the subtleties that become sec-
ond nature to the child may elude his parents despite high motivation and contin-
ued practice’. My new postgraduate overseas students prove this annually. They
start the year by worrying whether their children will ever cope with English, and
they end it by complaining how much better the children speak than themselves.
This belief in the superiority of young learners was enshrined in the critical period
hypothesis: the claim that human beings are only capable of learning their first lan-
guage between the age of two years and the early teens (Lenneberg, 1967). A variety
of explanations have been put forward for the apparent decline in adults: physical
factors such as the loss of ‘plasticity’ in the brain and ‘lateralization’ of the brain;
social factors such as the different situations and relationships that children
encounter compared to adults; and cognitive explanations such as the interference
with natural language learning by the adult’s more abstract mode of thinking (Cook,
1986). It has often been concluded that teachers should take advantage of this ease
of learning by teaching a second language as early as possible, hence such attempts
to teach a foreign language in the primary school as the brief-lived primary school
French programme in England. Indeed, the 1990s saw a growth in the UK in ‘bilin-
gual’ playgroups, teaching French to English-speaking children under the age of 5.