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

morphological and syntactical rules of the Dutch language more quickly than the
younger age groups and made the fastest progress between test intervals. The
subjects in this study, English native-speaking families who had moved to
Holland, were tested several times during a year and Snow & Hoefnagel-Hohle
found that in the first few months after arrival both the adults and adolescents
had achieved better grammatical competence than the children. After twelve
months the 12-15 year olds maintained an advantage over the younger children
aged 6-10 and the under fives continued to lag behind.

Krashen, Long & Scarcella (1979) concluded that if time and exposure were
held constant, research results suggest that in the area of morphological and
syntactical development adults proceed faster than children, older children
proceed faster than younger children and that all studies:

"...had failed to find a superiority for the younger child with respect to rate of
acquisition." (Krashen, Long & Scarcella, 1979: 581)

However, Krashen & Terrell also suggested that if rate and ultimate attainment
are distinguished, child starters in natural contexts outperform adult starters in
the long run:

"Rather, children are "better" with respect to ultimate attainment; over the long
run, those who start se∞nd languages as children will usually reach higher
levels of competence than those who start as adults (i.e. after age 15). Over
the short run, however, adults are faster in attaining second language
proficiency than younger children." (Krashen & Terrell, 1988: 45)

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