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Date Posted: 12:31:22 05/06/07 Sun
Author: Stela Spinola Ribeiro
Subject: Task two - Stela

CLASSIFICATION ESSAY


Second Language acquisition for older people



Since the late sixties and early seventies, when studies in second language acquisition started developing and applying scientific evidences of brain working, there has been a great struggle of arguments among reserchers that defend the CPH ( critical period hypothesis ) and those who disagree with the existence of it. According to this theory, people after pubescent age would have biological constraints to acquire a new language, and there are reserchers who even don’t believe that one could acquire it fully, with the grammatical competence and oral production of a native speaker. But, as we shall see, such arguments are not based in evidences, and learning after the so called critical period has been shown to be possible for many adult learners.
The first and more supported argument in favor of CPH was introduced by Lenneburg(1967), and claims that , after that critical period a loss of neural plasticity would occur, affecting crucially the way brain receives and stores information related to learning. In his own words:“ The end of the critical period was marked by termination of a state of organizational plasticity linked with latelarization of function .” In other words, after the age of thirteen, for example, a person would be considered old to acquire a language due to a process that reduce interface between different areas of the brain .But this is not conclusive, once more recent researches show that neural cells can be exercised through continuous stimuli such as learning , and be kept active just like muscles, thus delaying this process.
The second argument states that, after CP , there is a likely loss of language learning faculty _ what corresponds to Chomsky’s notion of Universal Grammar. However, others argue that is not this faculty that is lost, but instead that acquiring L2 parameters becomes quite difficult throughout the years: “Parameter values become progressively resistant to resetting with age, following the critical period.”( Towell and Hawkins,1994, p.126) What is said here, in other words, is that, for an adult learner is more difficult to acquire the grammatical structures and properties of a second language once he or she would have, first of all, to change the way this information is stored in brain in order to accomodate the new ones.
The third and most polemic argument defends a loss of cognitive properties regarding to language, mainly related to people who spent many years without being studying languages. But, once more, this says much more about what people can do in order to avoid difficulties in learning with age _ adulthood or maturity _ than discourages acquisition as if it was impossible because of age constraints.
As one could conclude, the factors presented to support CPH are much more based in personal lifestile and perseverance than in biological reasons that would impede the process completely. Unless there are cognitive factors creating difficulties in learning _ and even in this case one could not state that the process is impossible of going through , although more time and effort are needed on the learner’s part_ possibilities of learning with grammatical competence and nativelike pronunciation could not be denied, once each case depends enormously on the motivation and on the rythm one has. And we could state that, far of being biological, such factors are strictly personal.

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