Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

2 The child is more open to L2 learning in informal situations. Hence children are eas-
ier to teach through an informal approach.
3 The natural L2 situation may favour children. The teaching of adults requires the cre-
ation of language situations in the classroom that in some ways compensate for
this lack. An important characteristic of language spoken to small children is that
it is concerned with the ‘here and now’, rather than with the absent objects or the
abstract topics that are talked about in adult conversation – adults do not talk about
the weather much to a 2-year-old! That is to say, ordinary speech spoken by adults
to adults is too sophisticated for L2 learning. Restricting the language spoken to the
Age: are young L2 learners better than old learners? 149

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beginning L2 learner to make it reflect the here and now could be of benefit. This
is reminiscent of the audio-visual and situational teaching methods, which stress
the provision of concrete visual information through physical objects or pictures in
the early stages of L2 learning. But it may go against the idea that the content of
teaching should be relevant and should not be trivial.
Most adaptation to the age of the learner in textbooks probably concerns the
presentation of material and topics. Take New Headway (Soars and Soars, 2002):
the first lesson starts with photographs of opposite sex pairs of smiling people
aged between about 18 and 25, dressed in shirts, and looking lively (riding bicy-
cles, drinking Coke), all in colourfully glossy photographs; the topics in the book
include holidays and the Internet – what age would you say this was aimed at?
The opening lesson of Hotline (Hutchinson, 1992) has a photo-strip story of two
young men going along a street, one in a suit, the other with trainers and a pur-
ple backpack; topics include soap operas such as Neighbours and demos against
roadworks – what age is this for? The answers from the blurb are ‘adult and young
adult’ and ‘teenagers’ respectively. But, as always with published materials, they
have to aim at an ‘average’ student; many teenagers may scorn soap operas, many
adults have no interest in discussing holidays.
Individual differences in L2 users and L2 learners