English Language Teaching in its Social Context

FACTORS AFFECTING SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING 39grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in a second language appears to be affected by theage factor, as we will see in the next study by Johnson and Newport.Intuitions of grammaticalityJacqueline Johnson and Elissa Newport conducted a study of46 Chinese and Korean speakerswho had begun to learn English at different ages. All subjects were students or faculty at anAmerican university and all had been in the United States for at lcast three years.The studyalso included 23 native speakers of English (Johnson and Newport 1989).The participants in the study were given a judgement of grammaticality task whichtested 12 rules of English morphology and syntax. They heard sentences on a tape andhad to indicatc whether or not each sentence was correct. Half of the sentences weregrammatical, half were not.When they scored the tests, Johnson and Newport found that age of arrival in the UnitcdStates was a significant predictor of succcss on the test. When they grouped the learners inthe same way as Patkowski, comparing those who began their intensive exposure to Englishbetween the ages of 3 and 15 with those who arrived in the United States between the agesof 17 and 39, once again they found that there was a strong relationship betwccn an earlystart to language learning and bcttcr performance in the second language. Johnson andNewport noted that for those who began before the age of 15, and especially before the ageof 10, there were few individual differences in second language ability.Those who began laterdid not have native-like language abilities and were more likely to differ greatly from oneanothcr in ultimate attainment.This study, then, furthcr supports the hypothesis that there is a critical period forattaining full native-like mastery of a second language. Nevertheless, there is some researchwhich suggests that older learners may have an advantage, at least in the early stages of secondlanguage learning.lryounger really better?In 1978, Catherine Snow and Marian Hoefnagel-Hohle published an article based on aresearch project they had carried out in Holland.They had studied the progress of a groupof English speakers who were learning Dutch as a second language. What made their researchespecially valuable was that the learners they were following included children as young asthrec years old as well as older chldren, adolescents, and adults. Furthermore, a large numberof tasks was used, to measure different types of language use and language knowledge.Pronunciation was tested by having learners pronounce 80 Dutch words twice: the firsttime immediately after hearing a native speaker say the word; the second time, a few minuteslater, they were asked to say the word represented in a picture, without a model to imitate.Tape recordings of the learners were rated by a native speaker of Dutch on a six-point scale.In an auditory discrimination test, learners saw pictures of four objects. In each groupof four there were two whose names formed a minimal pair, that is, alike except for one sound(an example in English would be ‘ship’ and ‘sheep’). Learners heard one of the words andwere asked to indicate which picture was named by the word they heard.Morphology was tested using a procedure like the ‘wug test’, which required learnersto complete sentences by adding the correct grammatical markcrs to words whichwere supplied by the researchers. Again, to take an cxample from English, learners wereasked to complete sentences such as ‘Here is one boy. Now there are two of them.There are,two