English Language Teaching in its Social Context
English Language Teaching in its Social Context
English Language Teaching in its Social Context
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FACTORS AFFECTING SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING 39grammatical and ungrammatical sentences <strong>in</strong> a second language appears to be affected by theage factor, as we will see <strong>in</strong> the next study by Johnson and Newport.Intuitions of grammaticalityJacquel<strong>in</strong>e Johnson and Elissa Newport conducted a study of46 Ch<strong>in</strong>ese and Korean speakerswho had begun to learn <strong>English</strong> at different ages. All subjects were students or faculty at anAmerican university and all had been <strong>in</strong> the United States for at lcast three years.The studyalso <strong>in</strong>cluded 23 native speakers of <strong>English</strong> (Johnson and Newport 1989).The participants <strong>in</strong> the study were given a judgement of grammaticality task whichtested 12 rules of <strong>English</strong> morphology and syntax. They heard sentences on a tape andhad to <strong>in</strong>dicatc 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 <strong>in</strong> the UnitcdStates was a significant predictor of succcss on the test. When they grouped the learners <strong>in</strong>the same way as Patkowski, compar<strong>in</strong>g those who began their <strong>in</strong>tensive exposure to <strong>English</strong>between the ages of 3 and 15 with those who arrived <strong>in</strong> the United States between the agesof 17 and 39, once aga<strong>in</strong> they found that there was a strong relationship betwccn an earlystart to language learn<strong>in</strong>g and bcttcr performance <strong>in</strong> 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 <strong>in</strong>dividual differences <strong>in</strong> second language ability.Those who began laterdid not have native-like language abilities and were more likely to differ greatly from oneanothcr <strong>in</strong> ultimate atta<strong>in</strong>ment.This study, then, furthcr supports the hypothesis that there is a critical period foratta<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g full native-like mastery of a second language. Nevertheless, there is some researchwhich suggests that older learners may have an advantage, at least <strong>in</strong> the early stages of secondlanguage learn<strong>in</strong>g.lryounger really better?In 1978, Cather<strong>in</strong>e Snow and Marian Hoefnagel-Hohle published an article based on aresearch project they had carried out <strong>in</strong> Holland.They had studied the progress of a groupof <strong>English</strong> speakers who were learn<strong>in</strong>g Dutch as a second language. What made their researchespecially valuable was that the learners they were follow<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>cluded 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 hav<strong>in</strong>g learners pronounce 80 Dutch words twice: the firsttime immediately after hear<strong>in</strong>g a native speaker say the word; the second time, a few m<strong>in</strong>uteslater, they were asked to say the word represented <strong>in</strong> a picture, without a model to imitate.Tape record<strong>in</strong>gs of the learners were rated by a native speaker of Dutch on a six-po<strong>in</strong>t scale.In an auditory discrim<strong>in</strong>ation test, learners saw pictures of four objects. In each groupof four there were two whose names formed a m<strong>in</strong>imal pair, that is, alike except for one sound(an example <strong>in</strong> <strong>English</strong> would be ‘ship’ and ‘sheep’). Learners heard one of the words andwere asked to <strong>in</strong>dicate which picture was named by the word they heard.Morphology was tested us<strong>in</strong>g a procedure like the ‘wug test’, which required learnersto complete sentences by add<strong>in</strong>g the correct grammatical markcrs to words whichwere supplied by the researchers. Aga<strong>in</strong>, to take an cxample from <strong>English</strong>, learners wereasked to complete sentences such as ‘Here is one boy. Now there are two of them.There are,two