The authors examine the evidence relative to the idea that there is an age factor in first & second language acquisition & goes on to explore the various explanations that have been advanced to account for such evidence. Finally, it looks at educational ramifications of the age question.

Offers readers chapters on the age factor in different educational contexts across three continents. The book documents the development in research methods into early language learning and teaching. It includes papers that discuss curriculum and assessment, individual differences, innovation in teacher education, and the role of target language.

This book examines the various ways in which age affects the process and the product of foreign language learning in a school setting. It presents studies that cover a wide range of topics, from phonetics to learning strategies. It will be of interest to students and researchers working in SLA research, language planning and language teaching.

This book takes a hard look at some of the assumptions that are customarily made concerning the role of age in second language acquisition. The evidence and arguments the contributors present run counter to the notion that an early start in second language learning is of itself either absolutely sufficient or necessary for the attainment of native-like mastery of a second language. Another theme of the book is a doubt that there is a particular stage of maturity beyond which language learning is no longer fully possible. In short, the book presents a challenge to those who take it as given that second language learning is inevitably different in its essential nature from language acquisition in the childhood years and that second language knowledge acquired beyond the critical period is in all circumstances and in all respects doomed to fossilize at a non-native-like level.

This book constitutes a holistic study of how and why late starters surpass early starters in comparable instructional settings. Combining advanced quantitative methods with individual-level qualitative data, it examines the role of age of onset in the context of the Swiss multilingual educational system and focuses on performance at the beginning and end of secondary school, thereby offering a long-term view of the teenage experience of foreign language learning. The study scrutinised factors that seem to prevent young starters from profiting from their extended learning period and investigated the mechanisms that enable late beginners to catch up with early beginners relatively quickly. Taking account of contextual factors, individual socio-affective factors and instructional factors within a single longitudinal study, the book makes a convincing case that age of onset is not only of minimal relevance for many aspects of instructed language acquisition, but that in this context, for a number of reasons, a later onset can be beneficial.

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, Free University of Berlin (Institute for English Linguistics), course: Second Language Acquisition, 23 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: One of the central questions that SLA has tried to answer is why learners of a non-native language (L2) evince such a high degree of interindividual variation in their final attainment relative to the L2 components and skills they have acquired. In order to offer a satisfactory response to this key issue, SLA researchers have posited the existence of a set of individual factors of a very different nature, such as aptitude, motivation, attitude, personality, and intelligence, among others, that might explain such variation. However, one of the most obvious potential explanations for the lack of success of L2 learners compared to L1 learners is that the acquisition of a foreign language begins at a later age than that of the mother tongue does. Thus, it has been prevalently assumed that age itself is a predictor of second language proficiency. This paper focuses on research which has been carried out on maturational constraints for SLA and hereby tries to find answers to various questions concerning age as a factor in SLA.