Age and Learning a New Language What Essay

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Age and Learning a New Language

What is the ideal age for a person to be able to learn a new language? What are the dynamics (besides age) that contribute to SLA? This paper delves into those subjects using scholarly articles as resources.

The Literature on Learning a New Language and Age

"…Early beginners, through their longer exposure to L2, reach the necessary competence levels in their two languages sooner to allow transfer in both directions…" (Djigunovic, 2010).

Why are very young students especially gifted to pick up new languages quickly? The scholarship shows that younger learners "…have no awkwardness or inhibitions with the new language" and don't get too upset when they make mistakes (Cenoz, 2003, p. 77). As to whether or not younger learners "…soak up new languages" simply because the soak up information like a sponge soaks up water, Cenoz has his doubts. Indeed studies show younger learners excel in "listening comprehension," they are helped enormously by their positive attitudes and they are "…motivated because the teaching methodology used in kindergarten and primary school" tends to zero in on "communicative skills rather than on the formal structure of languages" (Cenoz, 79). Moreover, younger people approaching SLA have a "general positive attitude towards learning" as contrasted with older learners that show a "…rejection of the school system" (Cenoz, 79).

Authors Cummins and Davison explain that studies have shown that very young L2 learners can acquire "…linguistic competence that is indistinguishable from native speakers" (in terms of the time of response and the accuracy) even though the pronunciation may not be precisely the same as native speakers (Cummins, et al.

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, 2007). And importantly for teachers that work with young SLA learners, just because a student lacks a particular sound in their L1, doesn't mean at all that they lack the "building blocks" to acquire new sounds in their newly learned language.

Meanwhile, in the peer-reviewed journal Language and Speech, the authors report that the "age of arrival" (AoA) of an immigrant child has an effect of the "…production of second language (L2) prosody" (Huang, 2011, p. 387). "Prosody" means the intonation and rhythm (and the emotion) of the speech pattern. In this research article, three groups of ten Mandarin-speaking immigrants (with varying AoA) were tested and compared with ten native speakers of English; they were tested….....

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