Monday, July 9, 2012

EFFECTS OF PERSONALITY AND AGE ON SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION


EFFECTS OF PERSONALITY AND AGE ON SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

There are two aspects which make a difference in the language learning process and determine why those characteristics have such effects. They are effects of personality and effects of age. This research has important implications for pedagogy.
A.    Effects of Personality
The term ”personality” is generally understood even though it is not defined to scientific satisfaction. When we ask questions such as: Is X an introvert or extrovert? impulsive or reflective?, charming or dull? etc. We believe that the answers reveal something about an individual’s personality. The personality has relation to language learning. Personality covers self confidence, capacity to empathize, and the degree of logically or tendency to analyze.
1.      Self-Confidence
Nearly all the available literature suggests that self-confidence is very much related to second language development. Two measures of self-confidence are anxiety level and extroversion. Nearly all the studies conducted to determine the personality characteristics associated with successful L2 learning. Researchers have concluded that lower anxiety level and a tendency to be out going were connected with successful L2 acquisition..
The studies do not show precisely how self-confidence and language learning relate, but they do demonstrate the existence of the relationship. Self-confidence  people are less hampered by the conscious operation of the monitor because they are not so worried about how they appear.
2.      Empathy
Webster’s defines empathy as the “capacity for participation in other’s feeling or ideas.” Learning a language requires careful listening to others and caring more about communicating ideas than about avoiding speak errors. Researchers might find that studies using communication tasks as indicators of L2 success would yield a more systematic and positive  relationship between characteristics such as empathy and L2 acquisition.
3.      Analytical Tendencies
According to the literature in experimental psychology, “field independent” persons are able to perceive individual items that may relatively difficult to distinguish from their visual background, while the “field dependent“ person perceives all parts of the organized field as a total experience (Naiman et al., 1978). More analytical, field independent characteristics appear to be related to the acquisition of metalinguistic skills through conscious learning, while the field dependent person seems to be more apt to acquire communication skills through subconscious learning. H.D. Brown (1977) has also suggested that field independence may be related to conscious learning, while dependence may be related to subconscious acquisition.
4.      Personality and Monitor Use
Monitoring is used depends primarily on personality characteristics, especially self-confidence and self-consciousness. Researchers have identified three types of monitor users: over-users, under-users and optimal users. Over-users rely a great deal on their consciously acquired rule knowledge when they speak, and they tend to place correctness ahead of communication. Selective monitoring can increase accuracy without significantly interfering with communication. Optimal monitor users have generally acquired a substantial amount of the L2 subconsciously. Under-users are typically not embarrassed at their own errors.
B.     Effects of Age
The belief that children are better at language acquisition than adults is supported by both scientific and anecdotal evidence. Children acquiring second language in natural environments are more likely to sound like native speakers than adults are. Adults may appear to make greater progress initially, but children nearly always surpass them.
The available research comparing aspects of L2 performance in children and adults is basically of two types; (1) that which compares those who arrive before and after puberty, and (2) that which compares the rate at which aspects of language are acquired by younger and older L2 learners.
1.      Proficiency and Age of Arrival
Most of the studies comparing attained L2 proficiency and age of arrival in the host country have focused on pronunciation.
1.1  Pronunciation
Almost everyone learns the sound patterns of a language perfectly as a child, and almost no one can learn the sound patterns of a language perfectly as an adult (Scovel, 1969). Oyama (1976) studied a group of Italian-born male immigrants who had lived in the United States from five to eighteen years and who had learned English as a second language. In general, they were well educated. Oyama found a high degree of consistency among her judges (obtaining reliability coefficients of .80 for the story and .87 for the paragraph). The results for the paragraph are given in Table 4-1.

Table 4-1 mean Accent Scores on Paragraph Reading as a Function of Immigrant’s Age of Arrival and Number of Years in the United States

Number of Years in the United States
Age of Arrival
6 – 10
11 – 15
16 – 20
12 – 18
1.27
2.27
3.72
5 – 11
1.37
2.58
3.50

As the table indicates that the subjects’ age of arrival had the most effect on the degree of accent. Youngest arrivals had the least accent, but the amount of time the subjects spent in the United States did not influence the accent. The results for the story-telling task were quite similar.
Seliger, Krashen, and Ladefoged (1975) agreed with Oyama’s concerning. There is relationship of age of arrival and pronunciation proficiency. Subjects were asked whether they felt that most ordinary, native target-language-speaker could tell that they were not native speakers of those language. The results, which clearly agree with Oyama’s, are given in Table 4-2.

Table 4-2. Number of immigrants to the United States and Israel Reporting Degree of Foreign Accent by Age of Arrival.

Age of Arrival
Accent
Don’t Know
No Accent
9 and under
N
N
N
5
4
47
2
3
30
10 to 15
37
6
27
9
1
20
16 and over
106
4
7
50
1
5

The third study examining this question was conducted by Asher and Garcia (1969). They investigated age of arrival in the United States and second language accent in seventy-one Cuban immigrants, aged nine to seventeen.
Table 4-3



These three studies concluded that age of arrival is a powerful determinant of ultimate success in accent acquisition, and all confirm that puberty is an important turning point with respect to this aspect of language learning.

1.2  Grammar
There is less available on child-adult differences in the degree of proficiency ultimately attained in grammar. Similar results were obtained from Oyama’s “anomalous sentences” task, in which subjects were asked to decide which of two sentences was grammatically acceptable. Patkowki (1980) found evidence that age of arrival is related to syntactic proficiency.


2.      Rate of Acquisition
The evidence indicates that children are more successful than adults in learning a second language.
Snow and Hoefnagel-Hohle summarize their results as follows:
(1)   Considerable improvement occurred in all aspects of knowledge of Dutch for subjects of all ages.
(2)   Older learners seemed to have an advantage over younger learners in acquiring the role-governed aspects of a second language morphology and syntax.
(3)   There were no or very small age differences for tests reflecting control of the phonetic system.
Fathman (1975) indicated that older children’s faster rate of grammatical learning and there were some relationship between age and rate of learning.
Ervin-Tripp (1974) found that for most features of segmental phonology, the children above seven learned faster than the younger children and the older children were also better at morphology and syntax. On the other hand, Yamada, Takatsuka, Kotake, and Kurusu (1980) report that younger children are more successful at memorizing vocabulary and pronouncing new words in a second language.
It appears that for syntax and morphology, adults, at least in early stages, proceed faster than younger children, although older children around ten years of age may be the fastest of all.
3.      Sources of Age Differences
There are four factors which influence sources of age differences.
The first is biological factors, revolve around the question whether the adult  brain is fundamentally different from the child brain. The second is cognitive factors, the ability to formulate abstract hypotheses. The third is affective factors, to achieve the affective mental state necessary for acquisition. And the last is differences in the language environment for children and adults as a source of difference for L2 acquisition.

3.1  Biological Factors
Lenneberg (1967) hypothesized that the development of specialization of functions in the left and right sides of the brain begins in childhood and is completed at puberty.
The left side of the brain is involved in the language function in adults for the following reasons ( from Krashen, in Wittrock et al., 1977):
(1)   Loss of speech caused by brain damage occurs far more frequently from leftsided lesions than from rightsided lesions.
(2)   When the left hemisphere is temporarily anesthetized, loss of speech results; but when the right hemisphere is anesthetized this generally does not happen.
(3)   When competing simultaneous verbal material is presented to the two ears, the words or digits presented to the right ear are more often recalled correctly and subjects can react to them faster than those presented to the left ear.
(4)   During verbal tasks, whether performance is overt or covert, there are signs of greater electrical activity in the left hemisphere.
Lenneberg (1967) also presented  the hypotheses that the potential for language function is in both hemisphere in very young children and increasing age until around puberty. There are some evidences:
(1)   Right hemisphere damage occasionally causes speech deficits in children, while itrarely in adults.
(2)   When the left hemisphere is removed in adult, total aphasia (loss of language) results. In children this does not occur.
(3)   Children appear to recover from aphasia resulting from damage to one side of the brain, after language development has already begun, much better than adults do.
3.2  Cognitive Factors
The adult’s cognitive superiority should make adults better than children at language acquisition. Genesee (1977) notes that the adolescent’s more mature cognitive system, with its capacity to abstract, classify, and generalize, may be better suited for the complex task of second language learning than the unconscious, automatic kind of learning which is thought to be characteristics of young children. Taylor (1974) said that adult’s cognitive maturity should allow them to deal with the abstract nature of language  better than children. Cognitive differences between children and adults can explain some child-adult differences.
3.3  Affective Factors
The adult is more self-conscious than the child, is less able to identify with other groups, and is less able to achieve the open mental state necessary for language acquisition to take place.
According David Elkind (1970), he proposes that the onset of formal operations leads to affective differences between children and adults. The ability to think abstractly leads the adolescent to conceptualize his own thought to take his mental constructions as objects and reason about them. In other words, adolescents who have passed through formal operations gain a greater ability to imagine what other people are thinking about.
3.4  Differences in Language Environment
Child-adult learning differences are due to differences in the kind of language children and adults hear. Children receive much more concrete “here-and-now”  input, which facilities language acquisition; in contrast, adults typically are exposed to conversation about topics whose referents are not obvious from the non linguistic context. On the other hand, older students may be better at managing conversations.

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