Last week, when I was on a Bolt Bus going to NY, I ran into a friend who knew I was studying Ed. Linguistics and was intrigued by it, but had never had a chance to ask me any of the questions she had about the topic. So after spending an hour talking about line dancing at her brother's wedding and her trip around Europe, we got on the topic of why she can't speak proper Spanish after studying it for 10 years. She said she had started in middle school, when she was 12, which she thought was pretty early, and even though she could read a bunch, when it came to speaking to service people in Spain last summer, she was mortified. She wondered whether she would be fluent had she started a few years earlier, since she knew children were supposed to acquire new languages intuitively and mostly effortlessly. A few months ago, I probably would've agreed with her, lamented how I forgot all my French after studying it for 6 years as well, and moved on. But because we had just talked about this in my Second Language Acquisition class a couple weeks ago, I got really excited and told her all the stuff that surprised me about learning a foreign language in adolescence. I will now bestow upon you that same rant, because I think its fascinating.
It is generally true that if you learn a foreign language after the "critical period" which is said to occur somewhere around puberty, you will not acquire a native-like pronunciation in that language. There are some crazy exceptions though, like this woman who began learning Japanese at the age of 14 and is almost indistinguishable from a native speaker. But generally, either your native phonology interferes, or you just lose the motivation to acquire perfect pronunciation, because why, if you're already understood. There's also a difference between foreign language and second language learning contexts. The first means you are studying a language in a country that doesn't speak that language, and the second means you study a language in a classroom, but then also use it outside, because the country speaks that language. What I found out in class was that adults tend to learn language faster and more thoroughly in the classroom, because they have developed cognitive and analytical skills that help them learn patterns that children are less likely to know. So in the first year of classroom learning, adults perform better than children. In a second language setting, children tend to catch up and surpass adults after the first year, because they learn implicitly from their environment outside of class. But, in a foreign language setting, sometimes they never catch up, because they are receiving the same level of input. This blew my mind, because it completely displaces the myth that learning a language earlier is always better. So, my friend could have started learning Spanish at age 7, and still not been able to speak a word, because she didn't have prolonged input from native speakers and no motivation to achieve fluency outside of the classroom.
So then you wonder, with schools that are severely under-budgeted *cough cough* (Philly), is it better to start foreign language instruction as early as elementary school, or can it be pushed back to middle school/high school?