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

However, Neufeld's study was criticised by Long (1990) for the shortness of its
speech samples and the 'representativeness' of its subjects who were all
EngIishZFrench 'bilinguals'. Gass & Selinker (1994) commented on the
'Ianguage-Iike' behaviour of adults who do well on specific tasks but might do
'less well' in maintaining native-like accents over a period of time or in 'everyday
encounters' as:

"...the ability of older learners to quickly learn phonology, especially
Suprasegmental phonology, seems to atrophy rather quickly."
(Gass & Selinker, 1994: 240)

Bongaerts et al. (1995: 36) suggested that Neufeld's study might have simply
demonstrated that 'some adults have not lost the ability to imitate unfamiliar
sound patterns'. While one has to accept the critique, these studies
nevertheless challenge the notion of a critical period for the acquisition of the
phonological system of a language as a 'biological necessity'. In their own more
recent study Bongaerts, Planken & Schils (1995) found that Dutch learners of
English who started to learn English at the end of the critical period (around the
age of 12) could, with phonological training, still obtain standards in
pronunciation 'indistinguishable' from native -speakers. The subjects in this
study were ten adults aged between 23 and 52 who had started to learn English
around the age of twelve and who were either studying Orteaching English at a
Dutch university. Subjects performed four different speaking tasks ranging from
reading aloud single words to talking for three minutes about a topic.

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