Age effects on foreign language learning


In this entry, I’m going to summarize the main ideas about the age effects on foreign language learning. I will base on the articles written by Carme Muñoz, in which she investigates different groups of children of different ages with the same number of hours of instruction that deny some myths that people have about learning English as a third language.


Firstly, she saw that those students that have a high level of competence in L1 and L2, have also a high level of competence in L3. Moreover, she affirms that the knowledge of languages has a positive effect on the development of new languages because they will have more resources and strategies to learn it better.


Secondly, some people think that “The earlier you start learning a foreign language, the better results in written language” or “Children are like sponges because they have more resources to learn a new language” but in her investigation, she obtained that the age of the students has an influence on the learning of a new language because according to the results, older children got higher scores than younger children. That’s why the older children have a faster pace of learning, their brain is more mature and they have more cognitive strategies than younger children.


Finally, against the next myth: “Young children learn language as a game and they are more motivated than older learners in Primary”, her investigation shows that primary and Secondary students are both motivated learning English. Meanwhile, the factors of the motivation in Primary students are the teacher and the methodology, the Secondary students are conscient about importance of learning English for their academic and professional future.





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