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

ratings to those children who had started to acquire English before the age of
15 than to those who started after the age of 15. Patkowski hypothesised that
full native-like acquisition of syntax, indistinguishable from the native-speaker,
in both production and comprehension would only be possible before the age
of 15. He found that age of arrival was the strongest predictor of eventual
achievement. The earlier the children had arrived, the higher their syntactic
proficiency in the long run. Patkowski suggested that there were age-related
limitations in people's ability to acquire full command of the syntactical system
of a second language and that the best age for acquisition was between

12 and 15. An alternative explanation for the superiority of the pre-puberty
acquirers was offered by McLaughIin (1984) who argued that 'younger arrivals
might simply be more motivated'. In any case, as McLaughIin also pointed out:

"Even the study by Patkowski does not provide unequivocal evidence that
younger children (below 12) ultimately learn a second language better than
those who start at an older age (beyond 12)." (McLaughlin, 1984: 56)

A study by Johnson & Newport (1989) seemed to confirm the findings by
Patkowski. They evaluated the judgement of grammaticality of sentences by
Chinese and Korean speakers at university in America and found that age of
arrival was a predictor of success. Those who had arrived before puberty did
better in the acquisition of syntax than those who arrived after and those who
had arrived between three and fifteen did better than those who had arrived
between the ages of 17 and 39. A study mentioned earlier by Snow &
Hoefnagel-Hohle (1978) found that children aged between 12 and 15 acquired

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