peer editing to Joyce -- EnglishtextsM

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 12:09:35 06/19/07 Tue
Author: Gasperim
Subject: peer editing to Joyce

Date Posted: 18:37:02 06/13/07 Wed
Author: Joyce
Subject: Task 4

UFMG - FALE
Produ��o de texto
Profa: Adriana Tenuta
Student: Joyce L�cio Macedo

Task Four � Argumentative essay

Age and Second Language Acquisition

Substantial interest surrounds the question of how age affects second language acquisition. Children learn second languages quickly and easily. One frequently hears this proposition in various forms. It is asserted that children can learn languages faster than adults. It is commonly believed that children are better suited to learn a second language than are adults.( THAN ADULTS )

Typically, when pressed, people asserting the superiority of child learners resort to some variant of the Critical Period Hypothesis. The argument is that children are superior to adults in learning second languages because their brains are more flexible (Lenneberg, 1967; Penfield & Roberts, 1959). They can learn languages easily because their cortex is more plastic than that of older learners. (The corollary hypothesis is the "frozen brain hypothesis," applied to adult learners.)

In general (,)second language research has failed to support the Critical Period Hypothesis in its strong form, which argues that full language acquisition is impossible beyond a certain age.The critical period hypothesis has been questioned by many researchers in recent years and is presently quite controversial (Geneses, 1981; Harley, 1989; Newport, 1990). The evidence for the biological basis of the critical period has been challenged and the argument made that differences in the rate of second language acquisition may reflect psychological and social factors, rather then biological ones that favor child learners. For example, children may be more motivated than adults to learn the second language. There is probably more incentive for the child on the playground and in school to communicate in the second language than there is for the adult on the job (where they often can get by with routine phrases and expressions) or with friends (who may speak the individual's first language anyway). It frequently happens that children are placed in more situations where they are forced to speak the second language than are adults. (ADULTS ARE)

However, experimental research in which children have been compared to adults in second language learning has consistently demonstrated that adolescents and adults perform better than young children under controlled conditions. One difficulty in comparing the learning ability of children and older learners is that, in the majotiry if cases, children have better leraning conditions thatn older learners: more time, attention, communicative nedd, opportunities for use, and so on. In an attempt to make a fairer comparison, some researchers have studied situations where the opportunities for learning are similar for learners of different ages, In many caes, they have found that older learners seem to learn more efficiently. The weight of evidence suggests that, given more or less equal opportunities, efficiency in second language learning increases with age, and that younger learners are superior only in acquiring pronunciation skills.

Nonetheless, people continue to believe that children learn languages faster than adults. Is this superiority illusory? One difficulty in answering this question is that of applying the same criteria of language proficiency to both the child and the adult. The requirements to communicate as a child are quite different from the requirements to communicate as an adult. The child's constructions are shorter and simpler, and vocabulary is relatively small when compared with what is necessary for adults to speak at the same level of competence in a second language as they do in their first language. The child does not have to learn as much as an adult to achieve competence in communicating. Hence there is the illusion that the child learns more quickly than the adult, whereas when controlled research is conducted, in both formal and informal learning situations, results typically indicate that adult (and adolescent) learners perform better than young children.

DEAR JOYCE
Your writing was pretty good.The only thing which I �d like to point out is the fact that it seemed that your thesis statement was proposing children to be superior to adults when acquiring a second language.Nevertheless, throughout your develpmental paragraphs you �ve stirred up a conflict letting the reader provided with more arguments to think the opposite towards children and their performance.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]