I’m taking a course this fall called “Principles of Second Language Acquisition.” After more than twenty years as a teacher of English as a foreign language to adult Italian learners it was time I got some formal training in my profession. What I’ve been learning might be of interest to those (adolescents and older) who would like to learn a second or third language.

Popular wisdom on the age factor in second language (L2) learning is that children learn much faster and become much better users than adults. But recent comparative studies of young (pre-pubescent) and older  L2 learners have provided some new hope for older learners. It seems that when it comes to L2 learning, children and their elders are a bit like the tortoise and hare. 

Children get off to a head start but they go slower though ultimately farther than older learners who, contrary to the popular wisdom and despite a late start, learn faster and well, while rarely going the distance to “near-native performance.” What is it that accounts for the different pace and range of L2 learning? According to one recent scientific article, the determining factor is not age, except perhaps to the extent that age contributes to the creation of a less nurturing learning environment. 

Typically, immigrant children and the children of immigrant parents are immersed in an L2 learning environment which includes playmates and classmates as well as teachers and care givers who are native speakers. They thus spend most of their time outside the home in a native-speaking environment, where they are regularly provided with comprehensible and interesting L2 input which, as they meet and make new friends, they are highly motivated to transform into interesting and comprehensible L2 output. (Sorry about the scientific jargon; what we’re talking here is speech). Immigrant parents and adults, on the other hand, tend to spend most of their time in immigrant community L1 (their native language) environments where they have less opportunity and incentive to use and acquire L2. 

There are cases, however, where the old hares act like the younger tortoises, achieving near-native proficiency, and that is when they are in a learning environment that effectively keeps them young. When highly motivated adult learners are exposed to a naturalistic L2 environment  -- an environment where they are naturally exposed to and spurred to use L2 speech -- their age and previous learning experience can actually be an asset. Older L2 learners  are better equipped  than young learners, because of their accumulation of previous learning experience, to notice gaps in their knowledge and pay conscious attention to grammatical form in processing the L2 speech that is present in the environment. My teaching experience contains a good example of this. Italian army officers involved in NATO operations in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s spent months in an English-speaking work environment and were able to consolidate and dramatically improve their knowledge and communicative use of English. They were motivated, disciplined and experienced learners who took full advantage of a nurturing environment.

Considering the results of the most recent research and my own experience as an L2 learner and teacher I think it is fair to conclude that age is indeed a factor in L2 acquisition. But while older learners generally do not achieve the “near native” proficiency levels attained by younger learners, age may even be a learning enhancement factor for motivated learners in a nurturing, naturalistic L2 environment. So, if you want to learn a second language in your post-adolescent years, age is not an excuse. Take a few months or a year and go take a course where your chosen L2 is spoken by the people you’ll be living with.  A nurturing L2 environment can turn an experienced, late-starting hare into a long-distance, fast-finishing tortoise.

Tomorrow is the start of the semester here in New Jersey at Rutgers. 

These next four months will be by far the longest time I've spent in the United States in 28 years, since I moved to Italy in 1985. I've been here two weeks now and it’s clear that a lot has changed since 1985 but despite globalization it is striking how far ahead of Italy the U.S. is with the spread of information technology.  The other day I looked on the web for auto insurance and partially filled out two forms for quotes, leaving them unfinished, before going out to do some shopping. When I got home I had two voice mail messages from insurance companies asking me if I needed any help filling out the forms. Nothing like that has ever happened to anyone I know in Italy. 

There have been countless other examples of the omnipresence of IT over the past two weeks. But plenty of IT doesn’t necessarily mean plenty of I. Not once in the past two weeks have I seen or heard a news story about Italy and several well-informed and sophisticated people have asked me the name of the current prime minister or if a photo I’d sent them by email was actually Silvio Berlusconi. All the data zipping around seems to block out more information than it brings in.