Taken from: Cook, V. (2008). Second language learning and language teaching. (4th ed.).

London: Hodder Education. (pp. 147-150)

8.4 Age: are young L2 learners better than old learners?

Focusing questions
● What do you think is the best age for learning a new language? Why?
● How would your teaching of, say, the present tense, differ according to whether you
were teaching children or adults?

Keywords
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

Undoubtedly, children are popularly believed to be better at learning second languages 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 second nature to the child may elude his parents
despite high motivation and continued 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 language
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 ‘bilingual’ playgroups, teaching French to English-speaking children under the age
of 5.

Evidence for the effects of age on L2 learning

Evidence in favour of the superiority of young children, however, has proved surprisingly
hard to find. Much research, on the contrary, shows that age is a positive advantage.
English-speaking adults and children who had gone to live in Holland were compared using
a variety of tests (Snow and Hoefnagel-Höhle, 1977). At the end of three months, the older
learners were better at all aspects of Dutch except pronunciation. After a year this
advantage had faded and the older learners were better only at vocabulary. Studies in
Scandinavia showed that Swedish children improved at learning English throughout the
school years, and that Finnish-speaking children under 11 learning Swedish in Sweden
were worse than those over 11 (Eckstrand, 1978). Although the total physical response
method of teaching, with its emphasis on physical action, appears more suitable to children,
when it was used for teaching Russian to adults and children the older students were
consistently better (Asher and Price, 1967).
Even with the immersion techniques used in Canada in which English-speaking children
are taught the curriculum substantially through French, late immersion pupils were better
than early immersion students at marking number agreement on verbs, and at using ‘clitic’
pronouns (‘le’, ‘me’, etc.) in object verb constructions (Harley, 1986). To sum up, if
children and adults are compared who are learning a second language in exactly the same
way, whether as immigrants to Holland, or by the same method in the classroom, adults are
better. The apparent superiority of adults in such controlled research may mean that the
typical situations in which children find themselves are better suited to L2 learning than
those adults encounter. Age itself is not so important as the different interactions that
learners of different ages have with the situation and with other people.
However, there are many who would disagree and find age a burden for L2 learning. These
chiefly base themselves on work by Johnson and Newport (1989), who tested Chinese and
Korean learners living in the USA and found that the earlier they had arrived there, the
better they were at detecting ungrammatical use of grammatical morphemes such as ‘the’
and plural ‘-s’, and other properties of English such as wh-questions and word order;
indeed, those who arrived under the age of 7 were no different from natives. DeKeyser and
Larson-Hall (2005) found a negative correlation with age in ten research studies into age of
acquisition and grammaticality judgements, that is, older learners tend to do worse.
Usually children are thought to be better at pronunciation in particular. The claim is that an
authentic accent cannot be acquired if the second language is learnt after a particular age,
say the early teens. For instance, the best age for Cuban immigrants to come to the USA so
far as pronunciation is concerned is under 6, the worst over 13 (Asher and Garcia, 1969).
Ramsey and Wright (1974) found younger immigrants to Canada had less foreign accent
than older ones. But the evidence mostly is not clear-cut. Indeed, Ramsey and Wright’s
evidence has been challenged by Cummins (1981). Other research shows that when the
teaching situation is the same, older children are better than younger children even at
pronunciation. An experiment with the learning of Dutch by English children and adults
found imitation was more successful with older learners (Snow and Hoefnagel-Höhle,
1977). Neufeld (1978) trained adults with a pronunciation technique that moved them
gradually from listening to speaking. After 18 hours of teaching, 9 out of 20 students
convinced listeners they were native speakers of Japanese, 8 out of 20 that they were native
Chinese speakers.
It has become common to distinguish short-term benefits of youth from long-term
disadvantages of age. David Singleton (1989) sums up his authoritative review of age with
the statement:
The one interpretation of the evidence which does not appear to run into
contradictory data is that in naturalistic situations those whose exposure to a
second language begins in childhood in general eventually surpass those whose
exposure begins in adulthood, even though the latter usually show some initial
advantage over the former.
Adults start more quickly and then slow down. Though children start more slowly, they
finish up at a higher level. My own view is that much of the research is still open to other
interpretations (Cook, 1986). The studies that show long-term disadvantages mostly use
different methodologies and different types of learners from those conducted into short-
term learning. In particular, the long-term research has, by coincidence, mostly used
immigrants, particularly to the USA, but the short-term research has used learners in
educational systems elsewhere. Hence factors such as immigration cannot at present be
disentangled from age. Age in itself is no explanation if we cannot explain which aspect of
maturation causes the difference, whether physical, social, cognitive or linguistic.

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 second 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 language 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 simulation 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 physical 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.
2 The child is more open to L2 learning in informal situations. Hence children are easier to
teach through an informal approach.
3 The natural L2 situation may favour children. The teaching of adults requires the creation
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 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 bicycles, 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
purple 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.

Box 8.3 Age in L2 learning

● To be older leads to better learning in the short term, other things being equal.
● Some research still favours child superiority at pronunciation, but not reliably.
● Children get to a higher level of proficiency in the long term than those who start L2
learning while older, perhaps because adults slow down.