ry-johnson-newport-1989

> **ry - Why is this an important paper for SLA teachers to read in terms of the key SLA questions (week 1)?**
 * 1) Johnson, J. & Newport, E. (1989). Critical period effects in second language learning: The influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language

These are the key second language acquisition (SLA) questions
 * 1) What do all L2 learners know about language and communicating?
 * 2) What exactly does an L2 learner come to know?
 * 3) How does the L2 learner acquire this knowledge?
 * 4) Why are some L2 learners more successful than others?
 * 5) What are the implications of the answers to questions 1-4 for teaching?

Johns and Newport’s paper has direct implications with all five of these key SLA questions because it provides evidence supporting the maturational state hypothesis, a weaker form of the the “critical period” hypothesis for language learning that maintains that there is a best time determined by biology when a person can learn not only their L1 language, but also their L2 language. Instead of a “hard” or abrupt change at puberty from being able to learn a language to not being able to learn a language, the idea is that, while we are able to learn language best up until 6 or 7 years of age and we can still learn language and acquire native speaker grammar, fluidity, and accents up to around the age of 12 or 13, the changes in our ability to do so are gradual. Putting this is into a line graph, I interpret what I’ve read as something like this: While I could probably add some nuances to the curve, making the learning even more steep before age 6 compared to the curve by age 12, and show a longer asymptotic curve for a typical person’s language acquiring ability after age 12, this is the basic idea.

What is interesting to me is the paper’s conclusions is that the deterioration in language acquiring ability begins to deteriorate as early as 6 years old; not even close to the age of puberty. Also of pedagogical interest to me is that motivation, “good” or “bad” input, or even IQ, so long as they were within a not-to-extreme range, do not seem to have much effect in the early years and even to 12 or 13 years old. Several other ideas, such as “brain plasticity is gone after puberty” are rejected. Of course to be fair, we could say that plasticity plays a role, but that most neural plasticity is gone by 6 years of age.

The obvious implication with key SLA question #5 is that if we want to learn L2 or even L1 languages well, we should start doing so before we are thirteen or older, because our language acquiring abilities diminish significantly after these childhood years.