March 18, 2013

Rethinking different explanations about what makes children and adult language learning “different” in its process and outcome: considerations and thoughts after reading “Social constraints on adult language learning” by Robbins Burling



In the introduction of the paper, the author lists some of the “traditional” explanations for the commonly observed fact that adults and children seem to cope with language differently, which often leads to different acquisition/learning outcomes. I would like to list the three traditional explanations mentioned in this article, and express some considerations about the evidence usually brought up to support them:

1 – The notion of critical period (Lenneberg) or sensitive period (Lamandella) is the first traditional explanation cited in the article. This theory indicates that after a certain age humans just become very bad at learning new languages, whilst language acquisition is very natural, effortless and automatic during childhood. This theory usually finds its supporting evidence in neurological maturation and consequent lateralization of brain functions (mainly from the analysis of patients who underwent hemisphere decortication and patients affected with crossed aphasia). This evidence is still debated: other researchers think that it is not possible to link lateralization of brain functions to a critical period, since some evidence of a certain degree of lateralization for verbal functions might be found also at a very early age (I’m referring to Entus, who carried experiments on few weeks old infants).
Another argument that is used to support this theory is the impossibility to teach language to so called “feral children”, i.e. children that for various reasons grew up in isolation and verbal deprivation. This evidence is also controversial, since some of the children who grew in verbal deprivation but normal or semi-normal environment (like hearing children of deaf parents, or deaf children of hearing parents who do not teach them sign language) could usually catch up with language acquisition after their exposure to natural language (school years). The failure of teaching language to “feral children” like Victor of Aveyron (the young boy “discovered” in France two centuries ago and who is believed to have grown up in the wilds without human contact) or Genie (a girl rescued when she was 13 after she lived her childhood in a very abusive environment in which she was tied to a chair in a dark room and forced to be silent) is also difficult to be used itself as evidence for a critical period. In fact, “feral children” who grow up in this kind of situations do not only suffer of verbal deprivation but also social deprivation and sometimes, like in the case of Genie, they lack of any experience that is considered useful for children’s normal cognitive development. Also, it is not possible to completely exclude the possibility that those children where mentally impaired since birth.

2 – The second theory listed in the article claims that adults are impaired in language learning because they have already reached the cognitive stage of formal operation (Krashen formulates this theory following the developmental stages suggested by Piaget). This developmental stage is indicated as when humans become able of formulating general abstract hypothesis in order to explain recurrent phenomena.
I do not see how this ability would impair and not enhance language learning. Being able to induce rules out of statistical recurrence seems to be a very useful skill in language acquisition, otherwise language learners would be “stuck” and only be able to learn language “formulas”, without being able to create new (but acceptable) sentences.
It seems that children also have the ability of formulating abstract hypothesis, which are not always completely correct at first and might need to be “reformulated” several times. This, for example, seems to happen with lexical learning, when at the beginning children have the tendency to overgeneralize words. Nevertheless, we still need to consider that the amount of words overgeneralized by children is probably overestimated, since observation is often only limited to children’s production and not comprehension, and also because it is not very easy to clearly distinguish real overgeneralizations and random mistakes or strategies that children may use to make up for inaccessibility to the target lexical item.
But also if not considering overgeneralization, can word learning be limited to what the child experiences in the hic et nunc? If children were not able to formulate abstract hypothesis about words, how would they be able to name specific empirical objects they have never seen before? (For example a specific cat never seen before that has a fur with a color combination never seen before).

3 – The third and last explanation listed by the author is what Schumann reported after studying a Costa Rican immigrant’s difficulties in learning the English after moving to the States. According to Schumann, social factors constitute a very strong barrier preventing adult learners to be as successful as children in language learning. For social barriers he means the social contextual difficulties that for example an adult may encounter if he/she migrates to a new country, where they not only experience a cultural shock because of the differences between their own culture and the culture of the new country, but sometimes also have to deal with the native’s hostility and prejudices, due to the particular cultural, political, economic dominance relationships between the two language groups. This may lead to a psychological and social distance that makes the learners want to isolate themselves rather than become part of the new community, and the integration might be regarded as negative by the local community itself.
But does Schumann’s theory imply that if the social context is not hostile then language learners can avoid learning difficulties and frustrations? This does not seem to be the case. The strongest argument against this assumption is given by the author himself, who lived for one year in a foreign country (Sweden) in a not-hostile but indeed very welcoming social environment. Nevertheless, he still encountered many difficulties and frustrations in his process of learning Swedish as a second language. The author, who is an anthropologist, becomes his own subject in the investigation of his own language learning “failure”. The result is a very peculiars “self”-case study in which, mostly through introspection, note taking and anecdotal evidence, the author tries to reconstruct the path of his foreign language acquisition.
Since it is not possible to blame “social shock” or “social distance” in the case of the author (he describes Swedish people as very welcoming and nice to him), these factors cannot be regarded alone as the only causes of language learning difficulties in adults (also for Schumann’s subject). But still, the author does not believe that the only difference between adult and children language acquisition is determined by maturation reasons (as with Lenneberg’s or Krashen’s theories).
Adults need to deal with a learning environment and learning content which is totally different from what children face while they grow up. For example, adults need (and usually want) to express themselves in a polite way and not to sound rude, while smaller children are not that concerned about manners. This makes adults deal with very complex structures from the very beginning in order to learn how to address other people respectfully. But even though there is a stress on manners in instructional language teaching, if a learner uses an expression which is not considered polite in a real social context, other adults are likely to feel offended (while they will be more forgiving towards a child) or would feel that it is not appropriate in the moment to instruct the adult learner about what he should have said (while caregivers usually give explicit instructions on manner to children when they speak impolitely or say what they should not say). According to the author, this deprives adults of a very useful and context-transparent language feedback.
Also the content of the language learned by adults and children presents differences: children are more exposed to or interested in “everyday life” content, or content related to actions they see performed or that they perform at the moment, while adult are expected to and interested in more complex contents and feel the need to express complex opinions. These content related discrepancies also reflect on the very different order of acquisition of lexical items for children and adult learners.
With all this differences between child and adult learning related to content, environment, behavior, social expectations, social interactions, language exposure, language use and so on, it seems to be very difficult (and probably not fair) to blame adults, both in instructional and non-instructional learning environment, to be naturally non inclined to language learning as an explanation of their learning “failures”.

季安玫

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