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SUMMARY:Learning French from ages 5\, 7 and 11: an investigation into star
 ting ages\, rates and routes of learning amongst early foreign language le
 arners - Florence Myles and Rosamond Mitchell
DTSTART:20101101T170000Z
DTEND:20101101T183000Z
UID:TALK26550@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Ewa Illakowicz
DESCRIPTION:There has been a longstanding yet inconclusive debate about yo
 ung children's aptitude for foreign language learning\, and their special 
 characteristics as learners (see e.g. Nikolov & Djigunovic 2006). On the o
 ne hand it has been argued that young children are more likely to achieve 
 native speaker like levels of ultimate attainment\, especially in areas su
 ch as pronunciation. On the other hand\, it has been shown repeatedly that
  older learners are more efficient and make more rapid progress at least i
 n the short term\, presumably because of their ability to draw on a wider 
 range of cognitive strategies.\n\nThis talk will present a two-year ESRC p
 roject whose aim is to investigate the role of age in foreign language lea
 rning.  Three groups of classroom learners of French as a foreign language
 \, with English as their first language and with starting ages of 5\, 7 an
 d 11\, are receiving 40 hours of instruction\, taught by the same teacher 
 following similar teaching methods\, and their progress is assessed at int
 ervals on a number of dimensions. In addition\, the entire sequence of les
 sons is captured on video thus providing a complete record of target langu
 age input and children's engagement with this input.\n\nPreliminary result
 s examining the relationship between target language input\, interaction a
 nd the acquisition of receptive vocabulary will be presented. The analysis
  will relate the early learning of individual vocabulary items to the way 
 these items were encountered in the classroom input\, and to various other
  factors such as frequency\, whether the children produced as well as hear
 d the word\, what syntactic category the word belongs to\, etc. Conclusion
 s will be drawn on the extent to which active meaning-focused manipulation
  of new words contributes to their acquisition\, as compared with other ty
 pes of exposure through classroom input.   \n
LOCATION:Faculty of Education\, 184 Hills Road\, Cambridge\, room GS4
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