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

The concepts of 'rate' and 'ultimate attainment', however, are crucial issues in
learning a foreign language in the classroom and will be followed up again later
in the chapter.

In any case, the view that adults cannot under any circumstances achieve
native-like grammatical competence in a second language has recently been
challenged by Ioup et al. (1994). They re-examined the critical period
hypothesis in a case study of two adults and found that both were capable of
achieving native-like competence in Arabic, one achieving native-like fluency in
a natural 'Krashen' acquisition context, the other in a more formal environment.
It must be added though, that Julie, who acquired Arabic in a 'natural'
environment, did receive explanations and explicit error correction from family
members and also kept a 'learning' diary. One could therefore argue that she
also received a degree of formal instruction. Nevertheless, the research by
Ioup et al. suggests that adults can indeed manage to acquire a second
language to near-native standards and questions the general relevance of a
critical period for the acquisition of the syntax of a second language.

Martohardjono & Flynn (1995) report investigating whether native-speakers of
Chinese who learned English after the age of 15 'know that questioning a noun
inside a relative clause is ungrammatical in English even though allowed in
Chinese'. Since such knowledge is provided by Universal Grammar, the Critical
Period Hypothesis would predict that Chinese speakers learning English after
puberty would not recognise ungrammatical sentences:

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