P.Razinov

Age, Individual and Group Differences

In Foreign Language Acquisition

Razinov, Pavel ,

Karelian Post Diploma Teachers’ Training Institute, Russia

Paper is presented

in the 5th European Conference on Immersion Programmes

Vaasa, Finlandin August 2000.

Bilingualism and multilingualism are becoming more common in everyday life in the context of the European Dimension. Foreign language acquisition is a subject of research in didactics, development of didactical media, teaching processes and learning procedures in target language (methods ant techniques) and in the psychological acquisition mechanisms.

Theoretical background

The theoretical background of this research is the Theory of Cultural-Historical development of a Personality (L. Vygotsky), the Theory of Child’s Sensomotor Development according to Piaget, Theory of activity (L. Vygotsky, A.N. Leontjev), Theory of Step by Step Development of Child’s Intelligence (P. Galperin), Theory of Developmental Learning Activities (V. Davydov) and the theory of Native Language Development’s Stages (A. Markova).
Applied to foreign language acquisition the Theory of Speech Activity (A.A. Leontyev, I.A. Zimnyaya) as well as the Theory of Speech Actsfrom Intention to Articulation (W.J.M. Levelt) are considered. Further the background will be built on the Psychology and on the empirical research of Foreign Language Acquisition developed by A.A. Leontyev, I.A. Zimnyaya, M. Kabardov, A. Alkhazishvili.

While studying age, individual and group differences preliminary results of empirical study of speech and language development of children at the age of 6 months to 4 years (Kaisa Tolonen.1998) has been used as a basis for the analysis of the processes of foreign language acquisition The level of the child’s verbal and non-verbal communicative competence in native language determines the perspectives for the foreign and the second language acquisition.. (P. Razinov, A. Helenius, K. Tolonen).

It is very important to define at once differences between teaching a foreign language and a second language. Traditionally teaching of a foreign language means teaching not a native language: in some cases it is understood as teaching immigrants and their children of the language of the country they live in, in other cases this denotes teaching of a second state language which is the language of national communication. Teaching Swedish as second state language in Finland can serve as an example of teaching a second language, as well as teaching Russian in Russia or teaching Finnish of immigrants and their children in Finland and teaching English of immigrants in England and in the U.S.A and so on. Second language teaching is always aimed at integration of cultural values within a definite country and while meaning the educational context it is an intracultural element of the personality’s education and socialization.

Foreign language teaching is always connected with intercultural education, teaching of the language of international communication or the language of a neighboring country and it also means the absence of natural language environment. Very often the language atmosphere has an artificially modeled character and is limited by the walls of the classroom where the teacher creates language environment.

Foreign language teaching is always aimed at integration of cultural values of other country and its people while meaning the educational context it is an intercultural element of the personality’s education and socialization.

Contents, methods and techniques of second language and foreign language teaching differentiate from each other while having much in common.

The process of foreign language acquisition is connected with perception, encoding, re-coding and decoding of information, with the development of semantics on the base of senso-motorical intelligence. It is connected with the development of the articulatory motorics, audio-motorics, with the development of memory processing (autobiographical memory, declarative – general knowledge and facts’ - memory, procedure memory and priming memory),with the processes of speech production from an intention of communicative act to speech acts. Conscious as well unconscious cognitive processes are combined in language acquisition and according to some researchers (Pawel Lewicky) unconscious processes dominate in the language acquisition in preschool age. Language acquisition with latent periods (A. Alkhazishvili) which have always individual qualitative and quantitative characteristics.

Age peculiarities and differences in foreign language acquisition and learning are related to age peculiarities of the personality’s psychophisiological, mental, cognitive, social and native language development. In general age peculiarities in foreign language acquisition are connected more with age peculiarities of the development of basic language abilities, personality’s verbal intelligence and age peculiarities of memory and peculiarities of age learning abilities.

In this context one can point out several age periods which differ from each other through qualitative and resulting characteristics in foreign language learning and its acquisition.

Undoubtedly Lennenberg’s idea that the personality’s language development as to its age can be divided into prepuberal and post-puberal periods is still up to date.

During prepuberal period of the personality’s language development the following periods can be pointed out which differ from each other through qualitative characteristics in foreign language acquisition: 3 -5years; 8 - 10 years;10 –12,5 (13) years.

The very pubertal period (12,5/13 - 14,5/15 years of age) has its own peculiarities of both native and foreign language acquisition.

The postpubertal period of an individual's development also has several age stages differing from one another in qualitative and quantitative characteristics of peculiarities in a foreign language acquisition, and namely: 14,5/15 - 21 years, 21 - 30 years, 30 - 45 years and 45 - 60 years of age.

It is necessary to point out some age stages of the initial period when the greatest effect of immersion into a new language system is achieved, pupils acquire more effectively by the language itself and its methods of learning as well. It is well known that when beginning, each student should go through the moment of success which mobilizes the person to the following overcoming of all sorts of difficulties while learning a new language. Analysis of children’s teaching in pre school period shows that in school conditions and adult students it is possible to point out concrete age periods in person’s life which can be defined as the most sensitive for the learning initial stage. During these age periods personality is mostly prepared to language acquisition, making up its own rules, forming inner grammar system and practical usage of the knowledge received. Perhaps stressing of these stages is connected with psychophisiological changes in the body and cycles when personality is open or closed to the world around. The most sensitive periods typical for the initial stage can be shown in the following table, it can be read both, vertically and horizontally.

5 / 10 / 16 / 22 / 40 / 46
3 / 6,5 / 12 / 18 / 24 / 42 / 48
4 / 8 / 14 / 20 / 26 / 44 / 50

It is important to mark that researchers of sensitive periods in second language acquisition (Long M., 1990, Durkin K., 1995) stress that most of available studies have assessed development during the early stages of exposure to the new language. Long argues that experienced language users may have a temporary advantage. It could be that adults outperform children initially because they have superior cognitive abilities which they could apply to any task to relative advantage; but ultimately language acquisition may involve other, covert process which unfold over time, if they are still accessible, and it may be here that younger individuals have an advantage. Long also reviews evidence from longer term studies of second language acquisition, and here the evidence is decidedly in the opposite direction: only individuals who start to learn a second language before the age of 15, and ideally before the age of 6, achieve native-like proficiency.

Advantage of earlier teaching of second and foreign language is confirmed by a few of experimental data got (Mayo L.H., Florentine M, Buss S., 1997). Mayo L.H., Florentine M, Buss S., using the Speech Perception in Noise (SPIN) test tried to find out experimentally the effectiveness and qualitative characteristics of second language acquisition by people who began to study it at different age periods.

In order to determine how age of acquisition influences perception of second-language speech, the Speech Perception in Noise (SPIN) test was administered to native Mexican-Spanish-speaking listeners who learned fluent English before age 6 (early bilinguals) or after age 14 (late bilinguals) and monolingual American-English speakers (monolinguals). Results show that the levels of noise at which the speech was intelligible were significantly higher and the benefit from context was significantly greater for monolinguals and early bilinguals than for late bilinguals. These findings indicate that learning a second language at an early age is important for the acquisition of efficient high-level processing of it, at least in the presence of noise.

While the research of age peculiarities of a foreign language acquisition in pre-pubertal, pubertal and postpubertal periods was conducted in the context of development of didactical, teaching and learning media including textbooks with regards to school foreign language education (P. Razinov), the research of age peculiarities of a foreign language acquisition with regards to preschool education was conducted under consideration of the results of studying the speech and communicative development of an individual (Kaisa Tolonen, Aili Helenius) in the context of cross-cultural co-operation in integrating elements of culture and language into the contents of preschool education.

Foreign language education stimulates the communicative competence development, as well as the development of the native speech and language development of the child. It offers very effective supplementary means also for the emotional, cognitive and intellectual development of the personality of the pre-school child.

While fulfilling the cross-cultural research program the researchers' supposition has been that the communicative competence and communicative development are integral phenomena of cultural-historical development of an individual since his or her birth (P. Razinov, A. Helenius).

The researchers of the problem of communicative competence (Ton van der Geest, Rudie Gerstel, René Appel, Bernard Th. Tervoort) state that an effort has been made to find out the componental (structural) composition of this phenomenon.

So, from the point of view of interdiscipline approach the meaning of communicative competence is denoted as follows:

  1. Competence has linguistic as well as psychological and sociological aspects, i.e. there are both the knowledge of rules and structures and the use of this knowledge in speaking and understanding;
  2. Within psychological competence the abilities for perceiving have to be distinguished from each other, which is not true for linguistic competence;
  3. Psychologists focus mainly upon perceptions research in experimental situations and this has numerous drawbacks;
  4. Sociologically oriented linguists focus mainly upon production which is easier and safer to investigate than comprehension, especially where it is more a matter of measuring, comparing, judging, and evaluating the language capacity (Ton van der Geest, Rudie Gerstel, René Appel, Bernard Th. Tervoort, 1973, p.17).

Individual differences in an individual's communicative development and in formation of his/her communicative competence are stipulated by first of all basical (primary) genetical and mental factors, as well as by qualitative characteristics of the processes of an individual's socialization and interaction with the environment.

While analyzing individual differences in formation of the communicative competence a special attention should be paid to the primary mental abilities of an individual, to which according to according to Thurstone & Thurstone (1963), can be defined as: a) verbal comprehension (the ability to understand the meaning of words; vocabulary tests represent this factor); b) word fluency (the ability to think of words rapidly, as in solving anagrams or thinking of words that rhyme); c) number (the ability to work with numbers and perform computations); d) spatial (the ability to visualize space-form relationships, as in recognizing the same figure presented in different orientations); e) memory (the ability to recall verbal stimuli, such as word pairs or sentences); f) perceptual speed (the ability to grasp visual details quickly and to see similarities and differences between pictured objects); g) reasoning (the ability to find a general rule on the basis of presented instances, as in determining how a number series is constructed after being presented with only a portion of that series).

In studying group differences in linguistic, communicative and cognitive development it has become normative to form such separate groups as those of boys and girls, of children with difficulties in language development and of children with normal language development, as well as groups of rank-and-file and gifted children.

In this context, there are many researches of empirical and theoretical character, and it is not necessary to give examples of all of them. There are quite a few approaches in defining group age that can be applied to foreign language acquisition. E. g. W. Rivers (1972, 1983) points out 16 types of group differences in foreign language acquisition taking as examples adult students. The basis of this approach is definition of individual style of learning activity and the character of foreign language information working out. In the context of individual differences of foreign language acquisition by adults (M. Kabardov, 1983), distinguished two groups and two types of students which differ from each other – linguistic type and communicative type of students. When teaching foreign languages, in preschool and school age an attempt was made to point out groups of children and pupils who differed from each other by individually-typical features of foreign language acquisition.(P. Razinov, 1989). This study was done on example statistically represented chosen group in different regions of Russia. In this there were described individual characters of 2650 pupils. The main criteria was their successful foreign language acquisition.

According to qualitative and quantitative criteria the children can be divided into four groups on the bases of the success on the foreign language acquisition: a) communicatively active children; b) communicatively reactive children; c) communicatively initiated children; d) communicatively passive children (P. Razinov).

Empirical data on foreign language acquisition at pre-school age

Organization

Age peculiarities and age differences in the process of foreign language acquisition are connected with the finding of the most sensitive age periods for the child’s foreign language communicative competence formation and further development of it.

Study of age, individual and group differences of language acquisition is based on the arrangements of some models of Russian and Finnish as foreign languages acquisition at the Nakertaja –kindergarten in Kajaani (Finland) and at kindergartens N 99, N 107 in Petrozavodsk (Karelia).

The first model presupposes beginning of the language teaching at the age of three and is concerned on children of 3-5 years old; the second model presupposed beginning of the language teaching at the age of 5 and is concerned on children of 5-7 years old; the third model presupposes beginning of language teaching at the age of 4 and is concerned on children group of 4-7 years old which at the same time includes children of different ages; the fourth model presupposes beginning of language teaching at the age of 4 and oriented on children group of 4-7 years old which at the same time includes children of different ages with logopedic problems.

Methods

Foreign language instruction courses design; natural and formation experiment; formation procedures; pedagogical observation; analysis of video-tapes; diagnostics; interview of kindergarten pedagogues and children’s parents; analysis of expert reports and expert evaluations of the kindergarten pedagogues.

Results

In the context of the personality’ s preschool development (A. Helenius, K. Tolonen) made an attempt to concretize the quality of the zone of proximal development which define communicative development and qualitative characteristics of the personality’s communicative competence in pre-school childhood and influence on child’s language development.

Results and analysis of empirical data indicate that the best and most sensitive age for developing of the communicative competence in foreign language is the age from 3 to 5 years. The latent period of language acquisition in this age is minimal, because the output at this age don’t yet presupposes re-coding.
Native language semantics and communicative competence develop simultaneously. Minimal native language support is required: At this age the principle "One person - one language" is most effective. Foreign language acquisition distinguishing feature when the child begins to study the language at 3 years old is that semantics development both native and foreign languages goes on side by side and there is no interference of sound systems into each language. Semantics of the native as well as the foreign language help each other, broaden semantic and cognitive nets in the child’s developing representation system.At 5 years of age, on the contrary, the latent period increases, and the native language support plays an important role: the cognitive processes of a child at this age are based more on a native language verbal competence. At this age the principle, so we can say, "One person - two languages" is a proper way.

Both ages 3 and 5 are very sensitive for the development of phonemic hearing and articulatory mechanisms of a new language, as well as building pre-conditions for a no-accent speaking and a deep learning in the future.

Foreign language acquisition distinguishing feature at the initial age of five is that the informative data base is the native language while the basic elements of semantics are formed already. Development of the learned language ssemantics on the neuropsychophisiological level (N.Bekhtereva,1985) is related to the patterns of the native language semantics. In other words the pattern of a new word, word combination or new phrase will not be used in the learner’s representation system either by a child or an adult student until he doesn’t find a proper pattern of the native language on the neurophisiological level. As it is known the pattern of the native language as well as the learned second or foreign language has its phonological, morphological, syntactical, semantical, tactile (sensorimotor), emotional, verbal and visual character.

Research analysis in the field of children’s and adult students language development lets come to the conclusion that visual, semantic and communicative image of the pattern is integral phenomenon which defines both the process of understanding of other person’s language (P. Razinov, 1990, p. 176) as well as the person verbal intelligence development. Researchers of bilingual mental lexicon Levelt W.J.M., 1989; Garman M, 1990; Albert R., 1998 point out visual and auditive constructs of native and learned language semantics at that, the latters contain concepts (non-lexical knowledge) pragmatic information, grammatical information (syntax and morphology), meanings of words their phonemic/phonological and graphic/graphemic forms It is very important to pay attention to the development and formation of each of the semantic constructs in child’s representation systems while teaching second or foreign language. This concept is very actual and important in teaching both second and foreign languages on the next age stages of the personality’s life long development.