Age Onset Of Second Language Acquisition And Its Relative Achievements

Second language acquisition has been a hot research topicsince the 1960s. But in the early approaches, much was emphasized onhow second language was taught, as a result, various teaching methodswere proposed and put into practice .It seemed that all the methods weregood to some extent but no method was good in all circumstances. Manytheoretical problems had to be solved in teaching when learners'individual differences were taken into consideration. So researchers'attention was shifted from the teaching process to the learning process. Inthe past three decades, the study in this field has surpassed thetraditional linguistics approach, it has extended into almost all therelevant fields of language such as neuropsychology, psycholinguistics,pedagogy and statistics, it has become a trans-research field.This thesis sets out to explore the relationship between the age onset of second language acquisition and its relative achievements. Because of the differential success of the second language learners, more was attracted to the study of the learners' individual differences. The superiority of the younger learners to the older learners in the second language acquisition finds its explanation from Critical Period Hypothesis, but the arguments from proponent and opponent side never lead to anyagreeable conclusion. Personally, relating the current tendency to start English learning/teaching at lower age, we feel a great necessity to make comparison and analysis about the different age onset of the learners and their relative achievements so that we may have a better understanding of the relationship between learners of different age onset and their learning results.438 students in Quanzhou Teachers College (including English majors and non-English majors), and 192 senior school students in Guoguang Middle School participated in our study. An investigation was made through a questionnaire to identify the subjects' age onset of English learning, and then an archival study was performed to compare the achievements of the learners with different age onset. The original scores of the subjects' College Entrance Examination, Test for English Majors (Band-4) and College English Test (Band -4) were taken as raw data for statistics and analysis. The results indicated that there was significant difference between the types with different age onset and the achievements of second language acquisition, particularly in the aspect of Listening and Speaking. The results are of some significance in deciding the age onset for a child to learn a foreign language.