Theories
Instead of learning grammar rules one by one, adults can use this strategy of memorizing full, multi-word phrases.
What is chunking?
Content and Language Integrated Learning, is the approach teaches regular school subjects through the medium of a foreign language.
What is CLIL?
This type of research design follows the same group of children over an extended period, sometimes across several years, to observe how their language skills develop.
What is a longitudinal study?
Adults often face this psychological barrier regarding their social status and fear of making mistakes in public.
What is the need to protect social status / fear of negative evaluation?
Repeating this classroom activity helps children improve their fluency, build confidence, and decrease their reliance on their first language.
What is task repetition?
This protective factor is the active effort to step away from your native language by thinking directly in your L2 during conversations.
What is Decoupling?
This acronym describes learning English in a country where English is not the main daily language, usually receiving only a few hours of instruction per week.
What is EFL (English as a Foreign Language)?
A recent trend in applied linguistics suggests that researchers should stop doing studies on children and instead conduct research with children as active holders of this role.
What are co-researchers?
Perfect age to acquire multiple languages without any of the risks that older children face.
Infancy (0 to 2)
This area of language (which includes politeness rules and cultural context) remains completely unconstrained across the human lifespan.
What is pragmatics?
This traditional hypothesis claims that a biological deadline (typically puberty) stops humans from learning a language natively.
What is the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH)?
Rather than losing neural plasticity, adult performance drops around ages 17–18 are predominantly tied to this major sociological transition.
What is leaving formal high school (or entering the workforce)?
Oliver and Azkarai argue that researchers made a mistake by blindly applying findings from this older group directly to children without considering age differences.
Who are adults?
This stubborn feature of speech is notoriously hard for adult learners to lose because mouth and tongue muscle habits are already deeply set.
What is a foreign accent (articulation)?
Because adults possess vast pre-existing knowledge of world concepts, they hold a distinct cognitive advantage in acquiring this specific component of language.
What is the lexicon (or vocabulary)?
This theory explains age-related decline in L2 success as a result of cognitive, social, and motivational competition rather than a fixed biological deadline.
What is Emergentism?
Unlike EFL, this three-letter acronym refers to learning English in a country where English is already the primary language spoken, such as the US or Australia.
What is ESL?
Grounded in Michael Long’s work, this perspective proposes that second language acquisition is driven not just by input, but also by receiving reactive feedback, such as explicit corrections and recasts.
What is The Interactionist Perspective?
This protective factor bridges new vocabulary directly to an adult's pre-existing conceptual network, creating durable neural pathways for faster retrieval.
What is resonance?
ndividual testing that focuses on identifying cognitive abilities in order to predict L2 learning sucess.
Aptitude
This cognitive risk happens when deeply established native-language habits and patterns aggressively interfere with your attempts to learn an L2.
What is Negative Transfer?
This theoretical perspective, rooted in Vygotsky, emphasizes collaborative dialogue and how children use their first language as a tool to scaffold tasks.
What is the sociocultural perspective?
Among all linguistic levels, this specific area faces the strongest age constraint due to deeply ingrained mouth muscle habits, leading to persistent foreign accents.
What is Articulation (or Pronunciation)?
If an adult learner tries to translate every single word strictly by its dictionary definition instead of learning phrases, they are falling into this trap.
What is overanalysis?
Adult errors in morphology and syntax are frequently misattributed to a biological deadline, but are instead driven by negative transfer and this decades-long structural phenomenon.
L1 Entrenchment