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ASSIGNMENT 4

MI XIAO (GS54722)

Q: IS A CHILD AND ADULT LEARNING IN THE SAME WAY?

Adults and kids aren't really learners better or worse than each other, they just learn differently. When most kids start their learning, they focus on their teacher to determine what the child is going to study. Some adult learners, however, are more self-directed and often tend to be responsible for their own learning. In addition, many children usually need to learn to advance to the next level of education, while many adult learners have completed the compulsory school stages and willingly pick up additional skills. Generally, adult learners prefer skills that are structured around circumstances of life/work rather than units of the subject matter.Adult learning is a self-directed nature that connects adults and children to a major difference–their enthusiasm for learning.

External pressures and the consequences of failure typically motivate children. Even kids are usually asked what to do to work their way up to the next level. Adult learners are more likely to learn because they want to get more benefits for learning. Once adults are in a situation of learning, they will be able to bring to the situation all their life experiences, which will contribute to their learning and allow them to understand new knowledge. As children learn, they have very little life experience that can be used as a learning aid, so they rely mostly on the instructor's knowledge.

Deng and Zou (2016) are discussing the factors that might contribute to the adult language learning process. For example, ages, environment, motivation. This research concludes it's difficult for an adult to acquire a second language than a child.

Deng, F. & Zou, Q (2016). A study on whether the adults’ second language acquisition is easy

or not- from the perspective of children’s native language acquisition. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 6(4), 776-780.

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MOHAMAD FAKHRUL AIMAN BIN ZULKIFLEE (GS54517)

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MOHAMAD FAKHRUL AIMAN BIN ZULKIFLEE (GS54517)

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ASSIGNMENT 4

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IS A CHILD AND A ADULT LEARN LANGUAGE THE WAY

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SURESH RAMACHANDIRAN          (GS 54597)         

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SURESH RAMACHANDIRAN          (GS 54597)         

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CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION VS ADULT LEARNING

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GS54633

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NISHI SHANZIDA YESMIN
GS54454

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GS54786

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NAME:  Cao Mengdi                 Martic No. : GS53548 

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NAME:  Cao Mengdi                 Martic No. : GS53548 

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Samer Ahmad Almazead

GS54444

SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING

Assignment 4

The critical period hypothesis is the subject of a long-standing debate in linguistics and language acquisition over the extent to which the ability to acquire language is biologically linked to age. The hypothesis claims that there is an ideal time window to acquire language in a linguistically rich environment, after which further language acquisition becomes much more difficult and effortful. The critical period hypothesis states that the first few years of life are the crucial time in which an individual can acquire a language if presented with adequate stimuli. If language input does not occur until after this time, the individual will never achieve a full command of the language, especially grammatical systems. Certainly, older learners of a second language rarely achieve the native-like fluency that younger learners display, despite often progressing faster than children in the initial stages.

Krashen, Long and Scarcella (1979) suggest that the three generalizations concerning the relationship between age, rate, and eventual attainment in second language acquisition are: (1) Adults proceed through early stages of syntactic and morphological development faster than children (where time and exposure are held constant). (2) Older children acquire faster than younger children (again, in early stages of morphological and syntactic development where time and exposure are held constant). (3) Acquirers who begin natural exposure to second languages during childhood generally achieve higher second language proficiency than those beginning as adults.

In other words, adults and older children in general initially acquire the second language faster than young children (older-is-better for rate of acquisition), but child second language acquirers will usually be superior in terms of ultimate attainment (younger-is-better in the long run). For morphology and syntax, children apparently surpass adults in about one year. Hartshorne, Tenenbaum and Pinker (2018) opine that “people who learned a second language in childhood are difficult to distinguish from native speakers, whereas those who began in adulthood are often saddled with an accent and conspicuous grammatical errors”. They carried out a study on native and non-native English speakers. The results of their study support the existence of a sharply-

defined critical period for language acquisition. In the same vein, an investigation on the role of age of acquisition (AoA), socio-educational status (SES) and second language (L2) proficiency on neural processing of speech sounds was carried out by Archila-Suerte, Zevin and Hernandez (2015). Their results showed that the age of acquisition in second language learning had the strongest effect on the neural processing of L2 speech sounds.

From the foregoing, it is evident that child and adult L2 learners do not always learn in similar ways because of the difference in their age. The critical period hypothesis states that child l2 learners are usually more proficient in the second language than adult l2 learners especially because adult L2 learners will usually have an accent when speaking the second language as a result of their first language.

References
Krashen, S., Long, M. A. and Scarcella, S. C. (1979). Age, Rate and Eventual Attainment in Second Language Acquisition. TESOL Quarterly, 13(4), 573-582

Archila-Suerte, P., Zevin, J. and Hernandez, A. E. (2015). The effect of age of acquisition, socioeducational status, and proficiency on the neural processing of second language speech sounds. Brain and Language, 141(February), 35-49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2014.11.005

Hartshorne, J, K. Tenenbaum, J. B. and Pinker, S. (2018). A critical period for second language acquisition: Evidence from 2/3 million English speakers. Cognition, 177(August),263-277. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.04.007

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GS55354

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GS55519

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Assignment 4

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Assignment 4

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GS53429

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Amjed Bashar
GS53434

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Li You
GS55703

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Abdullah Majeed Buraa

GS54718

Assignment 4

Children can express thoughts that they do not express in speech. Moreover, children who produce mismatches on a given task are particularly ready to learn that task. that adults react to child disparity. In this study there is no different from adults reacting in a constructive way to a child’s explicitly saying, “I don’t know.” However, the phenomenon goes beyond this rather obvious process in two ways. First, the mismatching child is not really conveying ignorance—rather, the child is in effect saying, “I know two different ways of solving this problem,” one explicitly expressed in speech and the second conveyed through gesture. Adults respond to this variability in strategies with variability of their own. This study explains that there is no deference's between the child's and adults in process of learning and the child acquire the language but the adults learning the language. (Susan and Melissa ,2003)

This study to minimize the latter likelihood, instructions were reiterated throughout, and a follow-up question was included after the final question in which the task goals (maximize donations and minimize expense by minimizing accessories) were again repeated and participants permitted to modify their answer. Another possibility is a more subtle one having to do with demand characteristics, or rules of the game. Perhaps to a greater extent than younger participants, older ones interpreted the task as some sort of arbitrary logic game, in which the object was to interpret the presented relations between conditions and outcomes apart from any genuine meaning attributable to them. To explore participants 'interpretations of the task, we examined their verbal explanations during the sequential presentation and were alert for any differences in approach across age groups. The study findings illustrate that there is deference's in the learning process between child's and adults. (Deanna and Pease,2009)

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GS56426

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GS54693

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The findings of past studies on this issue are divergent. There is no definite answer to the question whether child and adult L2 learners learn in essentially similar ways. It might be the reason that too many variables need to be considered when such a empirical study is carried out, such as the division line between adults and children, the properties of the learners, the learning situation, the type of data and the specific linguistic phenomenon (Schimke and Dimroth, 2018).

Therefore, recent studies were centered on the domain in which similarities were found between child and adult L2 learners. Unsworth (2005) proposed that the development of syntax between child and adult L2 were alike due to the influence of the L1 on L2 syntax. Meisel (2009) found that in the domain of inflectional morphology, compared with L1, child L2 learners were more the same as L2 adults. Morales-Reyesa and Solerb (2016) assessed English articles from 30 Spanish children and concluded that both child and adult L2 learners had the same patterns in articles acquisition, and L1 knowledge played a key role in adults L2 learning while semantic universals in child L2 learning. Schimke and Dimroth (2018) investigated verb placement regarding negation of child L2 learners of German and discovered similar developmental stages in child and adult learners.

Reference:

Meisel JM (2009) Second language acquisition in early childhood. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 28: 5–34.

Morales-Reyes, A., & Gómez Soler, I. (2016). Transfer and semantic universals in the L2 acquisition of the English article system by child L2 learners. Language Acquisition, 23(1), 57–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2015.1067318

Schimke, S., & Dimroth, C. (2018). The influence of finiteness and lightness on verb placement in L2 German: Comparing child and adult learners. Second Language Research, 34(2), 229–256. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658317723071

Unsworth S (2005) Child L1, adult L2, child L2: Differences and similarities: A study on the acquisition of direct object scrambling in Dutch. Doctoral dissertation, Utrecht University. Dissertation series 119. Utrecht: LOT

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Prepared by Khaleda Alia, GS56119

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Do child and adult learn in essentially the same ways

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Second language (L2) learners refers to learners who embark on the learning of an additional language. They may be learning the target language formally or may simply 'pick it up' out of interest. Do child and adult L2 learners learn in essentially similar ways? Discuss your view based on a theory (theories) and evidence from past studies (not more than five).