A Study Of Age Factor Influencing Second Language Acquisition

Age difference in the process of second language acquisition is obvious. According to many studies, the age factor is one of the most important individual factors which have always been the study focus of linguists and perhaps one of the most controversial issues.There is a widely-held lay belief that younger second language learners generally do better than older learners. This is supported by the critical period hypothesis, according to it, there is a fixed span of years during which language learning can take place naturally and effortlessly, and after the period it is impossible to be completely successful. The critical period hypothesis was first proposed by Penfield and Roberts in 1959, and later was supported by Lenneberg in 1967. With the increasing number of international exchanges, china has become an incomparable huge English teaching country. English has been offered in primary schools since the early 1990s. Primary school English teaching is booming quickly. Relating the current tendency to start English learning/teaching at lower age, the author tries to study:1) Is there inevitable relationship between age-onset of English learning and English achievements by comparing the starters who began learning English at secondary school with the starters who began learning English at kindergarten and in elementary school?2) Whether it is true that the earlier a learner begins learning a second language, the greater superiority he or she makes in second language learning?The author investigated 100 non-English majors from Taiyuan University of science and technology who began learning English at different ages, carried out a study about relationship between age-onset of English learning and English achievements. According to their different starting age of English learning, the subjects were divided into three groups. English tests, including grammar tests, reading comprehension test, and writing test were given to them and the results of the tests were analyzed.The results from data analysis indicate that the relationship between onset age and English learning achievement is significant. The starters who learned English in the elementary school have clear advantage over the other two groups. The author made a conclusion that learners who began learning English early make better achievements than the learners who begin learning English later in the long run.