Questão 2493769

- This text refers to questions 33 to 35.

Teaching Young Learners

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How do we define “child learners” or “young learners” and what age brackets can be included in the definition? Nicholas and Lightbown (2008) suggest that balanced infant bilingualism is associated with exposure to two languages during the first two years of life. When a second language is introduced after the age of 2, we can define that process as child Second Language Acquisition (SLA) because these children can already build on a reasonably well-established first language (L1) system. Taking a broad educational definition of child, the upper age limit can be defined at around the age of 12, when children complete their primary/elementary education.

A great deal of interest has surrounded language learning in childhood because of the ongoing debate about the age factor and the so-called Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) (Lenneberg 1967). The CPH was proposed as a neurological explanation of the success of immigrant children as language learners (as compared with their parents). It is a concept borrowed from biology and it postulates that there is a defined period in a child´s life (roughly between birth and adolescence) when the brain´s plasticity allows effortless language acquisition that leads to nativelike competence. However, as the brain gradually loses this plasticity with lateralization, this innate capacity to acquire languages weakens. In L1 acquisition, research shows that children who are not exposed to language at all early in life (e.g. deaf children or those who were abandoned or grew up in isolation) have indeed great difficulty in acquiring their L1 after puberty and cannot achieve normal competence (e.g. Mayberry and Lock 2003). However, studies related to the CPH in L2 learning have produced more mixed results. In the context of researching age effects in SLA, some studies explored how similar or different children´s acquisition patterns are at different ages, while others explored whether younger children achieve better results than older learners, in order to tease out younger children´s characteristics as language learners and their specific advantages.

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PINTER, Annamaria. Teaching Young Learners. In: BURNS, A., RICHARDS, C. JACK.(Ed.) The Cambridge Guide to Pedagogy and Practice in Second Language Teaching. Cambridge; CUP, 2012, p 104.

About the Critical Period Hypothesis, the text says that: