A Critical Examination of the Beliefs about Learning a Foreign Language at Primary School

vocabulary and older children progressing more rapidly than younger children.
Snow, Hoefnagel & HohIe (1978) found that adolescents made the fastest
progress in the acquisition Ofvocabulary. A study carried out by Singleton in
1993 (reported in Singleton, 1995) into the learning of French by English
speakers found that those who started before the age of 12 did not do better
than those who started after the age of 12 despite the extra exposure time,
a finding which would support the suggestion that younger is not necessarily
better for lexical development in formal contexts. Nor is it necessarily the case
that the younger learner is the more efficient in this aspect of language
development. Krashen & Terrell (1988:156) report that children participating in
'Natural Approach' activities could acquire about 15-25 new lexical items per
hour for recognition purposes while adults could acquire up to 50 words per
hour, although, as Krashen & Terrell suggest, figures could vary depending on
language pairs and the motivation of the learners involved. As in other
language areas results are therefore not all conclusive.

Singleton (1995) refers to one of his own studies which seems to indicate that 'a
subsample containing some very early beginners is exhibiting a degree of
second language lexical proficiency which significantly surpasses that of a
subsample of subjects who started the second language at the age of 12'.

How much of the inferior performance of the older learners in this study could
be attributed to any age related maturationaɪ factors and how much to other
cognitive or affective factors, however, might be difficult to establish.

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