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

Martohadjono & Flynn (1995:138) argue that the acquisition of the lexicon of a
language may involve inductive procedures and may therefore be dependent on
cognitive faculties rather than a language faculty. In any case, the capacity to
acquire or learn the lexicon of a language does not seem to disappear with age.
A study by Service & Craik, for example, (referred to in Singleton, 1995)
showed that older learners were quite capable of learning new words and that
items of vocabulary can be learned and stored in both a first and second
language. There is little evidence therefore that:

"... the capacity to acquire new vocabulary disappears at any particular
maturational point, or that it necessarily be∞mes radically impaired even in old
age." (Singleton, 1995: 20)

Indeed it has already been argued that the acquisition of lexis is a lifelong and
necessary process without which any socialisation process would be seriously
inhibited.

In the area of lexical development, as in other areas, older learners seem to be
faster, but younger acquirers are likely to catch up, at least in naturalistic
environments. As has already been stated the concepts of 'total exposure time'
and 'ultimate attainment' are crucial in discussions of the classroom context,
especially in the UK context. While the younger starters might well overtake the
post-puberty starters in a natural second language acquisition environment
purely as a result of amount of exposure, the same is not necessarily the case
in the foreign language classroom.

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