English Language Teaching in its Social Context

40 PATSY M. LIGHTBOWN AND NINA SPADAThe sentence repetition task required learners to repeat 37 sentences of increasing lengthand grammatical complexity.For sentence translation, learners were given 60 sentences to translate from English toDutch. A point was given for each grammatical structure which was rendered into the correctDutch equivalent.In the sentenceludgement task, learners were to judge which of two sentences was better.The same content was expressed in both sentences, but one sentence was grammaticallycorrect while the other contained errors.In the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Est, learners saw four pictures and heard one isolatedword.Their task was to indicate which picture matched the word spoken by the tester.For the story comprehension task, learners heard a story in Dutch and were then asked toretell the story in English or Dutch (according to their preference).Finally, the storytelling task required learners to tell a story in Dutch, using a set of picturesthey were given. Rate of delivery of speech mattered more than the expression of contentor formal accuracy.The learners were divided into several age groups, but for our discussion we will dividethem into just three groups: children (aged 3 to lo), adolescents (1 2 to 15 years), and adults(1 8 to 60 ycars).The children and adolescents all attended Dutch schools. Some of the adultsworked in Dutch work environments, but most of their Dutch colleagues spoke Englishwell. Other adults were parents who did not work outside their homes and thus hadsomewhat less contact with Dutch than most of the other subjects.The learners were tested three times, at four- to five-month intervals.They were firsttested within six months of their arrival in Holland and within six weeks of their startingschool or work in a Dutch-language environment.ActivityComparing child, adolescent, and adult language learnersWhich group do you think (lid best on the first test (that is, who learned fastcst)?Which groupdo you think was best by the end of the year? Do you think some groups would do better oncertain tasks than others? For example, who do you think would do best on the Pronunciationtasks, and who would do best on the tasks requiring more mctalinguistic awareness? Compareyour predictions with the results for the different tasks which are presented inTable 2.1. An‘X’ indicates that the group was the best on the test at the beginning of the year (an indicationof the rate of learning), and a ‘Y’ indicates the group that did best at the end of the year (anindication of eventual attainment) .In the Snow and Hoefnagel-Hohle study, the adolescents were by far the most successful1carners.They were ahead of everyone on all but one of the tests (pronunciation) on the firsttest session.That is, within the first few months the adolescents had already made the mostprogress in learning Dutch.As the table indicates, it was the adults who were better than thechildren and adolescents on pronunciation in the first test session. Surprisingly, it was alsothe adults, not the children, whose scores were second best on the other tests at the first testsession. In other words, adolescents and adults learned faster than children in the first fewmonths of exposure to Dutch.By the end of the year, the children were catching up, or had surpassed, the adults onseveral measures. Nevertheless, it was the adolescents who retained the highest levels ofperformance overall.