Education Week - May 9, 2018 - 6

Study: Language-Learning Ability Is Strong Until Late Teens
Optimal time frame
may be longer
By Corey Mitchell
Scientists have long posited that
there is a "critical period" for language
learning, but new research suggests
that the time frame stretches on
much longer than previously thought.
The study, from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, suggests that
children remain skilled at learning
the grammar of English up to the age
of 17 or 18, the time at which many
students graduate from high school.
The finding injects new evidence
for the decades-long debate over the
"critical period" that had centered
on whether the decline in languagelearning skills begins at age 5 or at
the onset of puberty.
The research could have implications for K-12 schools, where the
number of English-as-a-secondlanguage speakers is on the rise,
but the quality of education those
students receive has faced increased
scrutiny. The findings could be especially relevant for the education of
newcomer immigrant and refugee
English-learners who arrive in the
United States as middle and high
school students.
"[The work] should raise teachers'
sense of self-efficacy ... that they do

have a tremendous impact on second-language learners who are in
their secondary school years," said
Shannon Daniel, a senior lecturer at
Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of Education whose work focuses
on improving English-languagelearner-education in U.S. schools.
The same MIT study also found
that it is difficult for people to achieve
proficiency in English similar to that
of a native speaker unless they start
learning a language much earlier, by
the age of 10. People who start learning a language between the ages of
10 and 18 will still learn quickly, but
since they have a shorter window
before their learning ability declines,
they're less likely to reach the proficiency of native speakers, the researchers found.
"It takes work on the part of the
parents, but, as far as the child's
concerned, it's quite easy to become
bilingual," Joshua Hartshorne, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College, who conducted the study
as a postdoctoral scholar at MIT.
"That's when you're best at learning
languages. It's not really something
that you can make up later."

What Is Bilingualism?
A March 2017 study from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine detailed how
underresourced schools and under-

prepared educators hinder efforts
to help students learn and master
English. The report's authors contend that teacher- and principalpreparation programs must adapt
their curricula and training to ensure that K-12 educators are ready
to work with an ever-diversifying
student population, especially older
students who come to the United
States knowing little, if any, English.
"A really important question that's
raised is what precisely do we mean
when we say someone has proficiency in the second or foreign language," Daniel said.
In other words, does a deep knowledge of grammar equate to language
proficiency?
Not necessarily, said Judith Kroll,
the director of the Bilingualism,
Mind, and Brain Lab at the University of California, Riverside.
"Is the goal to become a monolingual-like native speaker? No, the
goal is to become a proficient, bilingual-like speaker of two languages,"
said Kroll, a professor of psychology
and linguistics.
While it's typical for children to
pick up languages more easily than
adults, researchers have struggled to
study this phenomenon in laboratory
settings.
The latest research findings are
based on an analysis of results from a
10-minute online grammar quiz.
To avoid the costly and time-con-

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suming process of following test subjects as they learn a new language
over many years, the researchers
tried a different approach: They used
the online quiz to measure the grammatical ability of many people of different ages who started learning English at different points in their lives,
in hopes of gathering enough data to
come to some meaningful conclusions.
The response was overwhelming;
nearly 670,000 English-learners
participated.

Defining Goals
In that quiz, the MIT research team
focused on grammatical rules most
likely to confuse a non-native speaker
and wrote questions that could trip
them up. To entice more people to take
the test, Hartshorne also included
questions that were not necessary
for measuring language learning but
were designed to reveal which dialect
of English the test-taker speaks.
After taking the quiz, users answered questions about their current
age and the age at which they began
learning English, as well as other information about their language background.
As the results rolled in, the researchers spent nine months developing and testing a variety of models to see which was most consistent
with their results. They came to the
conclusion that grammar-learning

ability remains strong until the
late teenage years, at which point it
drops precipitously.
"Teachers have to be really careful
to avoid the assumption that grammatical competence is equivalent to
proficiency in English," said Daniel, who has worked with Englishlearner students in schools and colleges in the U.S. and abroad.
"It's certainly more important for
teachers to recognize if someone
[can] communicate with others, to
accomplish their goals on a day-today basis, rather than being able to
identify the prescriptive grammar
rule," Daniel also said.
Though adults are still good at
learning foreign languages, the
chances of reaching the level of a native speaker are slim if they begin
learning as a teenager or as an
adult, the MIT researchers found.
But the research team still does
not know what closes the window on
the so-called "critical period."
Hartshorne will embark on several related studies, including one
that will compare native and nonnative speakers of two additional
languages: Spanish and Mandarin.
Like English, those two languages
have millions of non-native speakers trying to learn one or the other
of them.
"We're interested in language learning, not specifically English learning,"
Hartshorne said.

digital Learning Evolves to
meet the Future of Work
many school and district leaders are
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learning programs that help students
become better problem solvers and more
skilled users of technology. the goal is to
prepare them for the future of work. But
reaching that goal will take a lot of hard
work. our experts will guide you through
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guEst
* JaimE donaLLy, former math teacher
and instructional technologist, and author,
"Learning transported: augmented, Virtual
and mixed reality for all Classrooms"
modERatoR
* miChELLE r. daVis, senior writer,
Education Week Digital Directions

Education Week - May 9, 2018

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