Module 6

Pathways to Competence

What can we learn from the debate on first-language acquisition that will help us as language-teachers? Let's just sum up the possibilities :

1. Chomsky is right and there is a LAD which children use to automatically construct their first language - and also, perhaps, other languages if they learn them before the end of the Critical Period. If this is so then
   • the LAD ceases to operate once you have passed the critical period, and adolescents and adults can no longer call upon it when learning a second language
   • the LAD, once it has been set in motion in infancy, remains available for subsequent languages. It may, however, be more difficult to plug into. In this case, adolescents and adults may use it to learn a second language
2. Chomsky is wrong ; the way a child's entourage behaves towards her is critical for the development of her linguistic skills. The greater difficulties faced by adult learners come about largely because it is difficult, if not impossible, to create a learning environment of the same kind as that in which the child acquires her first tongue. Nevertheless, adults do have some trumps up their sleeves ; they are better at learning declarative items than are young children.

What does the evidence suggest about similarities and differences between adult-learners and children? Most people firmly believe that young children pick up foreign languages more easily than do adults. There are some indications that this may be so. However, if we look closely, this seems mainly to concern phonological aspects of language ; it has been observed that the accents of immigrants to the United States who enter before their tenth birthday are later indistinguishable from those of people born in the country, while the accents of those who enter in their teens continue to carry traces of their first language.

But when it comes to learning rules of grammar or lists of vocabulary and irregular verbs, adults and adolescents outperform children. If you give them the same number of hours of language tuition, at the end of the year, the older learners will score better on paper and pencil tests than will the younger ones.

So perhaps we should concentrate on phonology with younger learners, and leave the hard work for when they are older? Unfortunately, things aren't quite as simple as that ; you can get a good score on a grammar test and still not be able to express yourself in the language. You can know your irregular verbs by heart - and still get them wrong in both written and spoken expression. There seems to be a difference between what we know and what we can do - between declarative and procedural knowledge.

You have seen how Anderson explains this distance. But not everyone agrees with him. Some people - perhaps most vocal among them is Stephen Krashen - believe that conning rules and learning vocabulary has very little impact upon the way we really acquire a foreign language. In the end - from this point of view - both children and adults acquire an FL in the same way - but adults also acquire knowledge about the language, which children, for the most part, do not.

You may want to look at this web site which includes a partial bibliography and a selection of articles by Stephen Krashen. When you have looked at that, go on to the next section.

If you have a comment or a question, write to tmason@timothyjpmason.com