Time is running out for people seeking to learn a second language-at least if they want to learn it well.
As a person grows older, it becomes harder to learn familiar patterns of language, said Robert DeKeyser, a linguistics instructor at the University of Maryland.
“It is harder to learn an entirely different language at an older age because you have to deal with new meanings,” he said. “If you have to express new components that you don’t express at all in your native language, it tends to become quite difficult to remember it.”
DeKeyser explained the correlation of language and age during a lecture entitled “Salience: A Crucial Explanatory Variable In Second-Language Acquisition” on March 23 in LNCO.
The way a person is taught a second language, DeKeyser said, is just as important as the age at which the person was first exposed to the language.
Zuzana Sarikova, a graduate student in linguistics, said that it is important to shed light on how languages are learned to help teachers deliver more effective language instruction to their students.
“Usually researchers offer advice that is still two to three steps away from a real classroom setting,” Sarikova said. “However, DeKeyser offers specific examples of activities that work well in second- and foreign-language classes.”
Instructors can teach language more effectively by grouping similar words together or explaining grammatical patterns the old-fashioned way, DeKeyser said.
“This way, you force students to pay attention to meanings that they normally wouldn’t pay attention to,” he said.
Erin Larsen, a junior in linguistics, said DeKeyser’s advice would have been helpful if she would have heard it before taking German classes in high school.
“I didn’t know anything about language acquisition before I learned German,” Larsen said. “But now, fortunately, I can look back and see what I could’ve done better and what I did well.”