Language Acquisition in Secondary-Level Students: Learning a Foreign Language in High School

Human babies are born with the capacity and potential to learn language very quickly. As young children learn language naturally and easily, they smoothly transition from nonverbal to fluent. A young child can learn even several languages with relative ease. As a child grows older, however, the language acquisition process changes. What was once natural and nearly effortless now becomes a struggle. In the United States, foreign languages are not taught in schools until the secondary level, after puberty, when a child’s brain has progressed to the point where acquisition is not the smooth, natural process it once was. This presents specific problems and challenges to teachers who choose to teach second languages to students. While the secondary-level student will most likely never achieve native-level fluency in the second language begun in middle or high school, there are teaching techniques that can aid the student as much as possible. Some of these techniques mimic the language acquisition strategies of babies learning their first language. But most of these techniques are specifically targeted to address the older learner’s language acquisition style.
Soon after a baby is born, he begins cooing and babbling, which are the universal beginnings of speech. Even deaf babies who do not babble sounds will babble using their fingers. At this stage and subsequent stages, babies understand more language than they can express. As the baby learns how to use language, he gestures and then begins to name the people, things, and actions most familiar to him. By the age of 16-24 months old, he learns words for so many things that experts call it a “naming explosion” (Bee, 2002). He learns words in groups, such as types of fruit or words with similar meanings (Bee, 2002). Most of these words are nouns, with a few verbs mixed in.
The baby’s grammar develops from one-word holophrases to two-word and then many-word phrases. A holophrase is a word such as ‘milk,’ which when said by the young child, means, ‘I want my milk.’ Two-word sentences are similarly two words used to stand for longer phrases. “The first two-word sentences usually appear between 18 and 24 months. This is not a random or independent event. Recent research… suggests that sentences appear only when a child has reached some threshold level of vocabulary size—somewhere around 100 to 200 words” (Bee, 2002). Once babies begin talking at this level, they start developing their vocabulary, adding suffixes to nouns and verbs. Around the age of 27-36 months, babies go through a “grammar explosion.” Because they have a significant repertoire of vocabulary, they begin to learn grammatical rules, such as adding ‘-ing’ to the end of verbs and using negative construction (e.g. ‘This is not mine’). In English, this is when babies begin to learn the rules for using verbs in the past tense. Babies learn the general rule first (add ‘-ed’ to the end) and use it universally. Then they learn the many exceptions one-by-one when their parents correct them. Babies who simultaneously learn two languages (one from each parent, perhaps) generally lag behind their monolingual peers in the earlier developmental stages. However, they catch up by the age of two or three, and the child then has two native languages.
Parents and caretakers teach a language to a baby not by lecturing him, but by interacting with him. One type of interaction is called “motherese” (Bee, 2002). Motherese is simply how a mother talks to her child, especially in contrast to how she talks to other adults. A baby learns from the mother’s example, such as when the baby says, ‘this hat,’ and the mother corrects it saying, ‘Yes, this is a hat.’ Another interaction that increases a child’s vocabulary is “dialogic reading” (Bee, 2002). This is when an adult reads to a child, asking them questions such as ‘What is this?’ (while pointing to the page) or ‘What is the puppy doing?’ These interactions engage the child’s mind and have been shown to significantly increase a child’s vocabulary, even over a short period of time (Bee, 2002). Also, the act of reading introduces new words and new linguistic patterns that the child may otherwise not hear on a day-to-day basis.
One interesting thing about studying language acquisition is that babies almost universally acquire language. Barring serious learning impediments, children always become fluent in their mother tongues. However, the same cannot be said for learning a second language in middle school or high school. Adolescents learning foreign languages are largely unsuccessful (Zhongganggao, 2001). It seems that by the time a person goes through puberty, language acquisition is over, and older learners approach learning a language the way they would approach learning any other subject. After puberty, the brain is not as pliable or formable as a child’s. Adolescents and adults are past the so-called “critical period” (Zhongganggao, 2001) where language is acquired in a natural, unforced way. It may be impossible for adolescents or adults to approach language learning the way a baby approaches language acquisition. In addition to the physical constraints, there is usually a social constraint. Older learners generally want to speak about more complex ideas than a baby does. They are accustomed to speaking their native language at a certain level, and they may not be satisfied with only learning to speak a language beginning with simple, two-word phrases. They want to be able to translate their thoughts and ideas into the different language at the same complexity as their native tongue. So the stages of language acquisition are rushed or omitted entirely when teaching a language to a secondary-level student.
Some of the language acquisition stages would be of little use to an older language learner. For example, the stages of cooing and babbling are useful for a baby to learn the purpose of language, and it can be assumed that if students are capable of communicating in their native language, they are capable of understanding the purpose of language. A naming explosion would probably not be as spontaneous in an older student as in a baby. The repetition of ‘What’s this? What’s this?’ would seem tedious, and the praise (‘good job!’) insincere, to a secondary-level learner. Also, an adolescent would probably find holophrases and two-word phrases too limiting, preferring instead to use more complex sentences and grammar to express his thoughts.
There are, however, many aspects of children’s linguistic acquisition that could be directly applicable to secondary-level students. When learning a language, both babies and adolescents generally comprehend more than they can personally express. Also, babies seem to prepare themselves with an arsenal of words before they start combining them into grammatical phrases. It may be valuable to approach second-language learning in a similar way. It might be better to first spend time learning vocabulary, simulating a naming explosion, before delving into complex grammatical studies. Once the older students have spent adequate time building their arsenals of words, along with basic grammar of course, they will be ready for a future grammar explosion.
To an adolescent, motherese may sound condescending and insulting. However, the principle of motherese may be adjusted to be applicable to older students of foreign languages. When a student makes a slight error in grammar or pronunciation, the teacher can affirm the correctness of what the student did say, while correcting the slight mistake in a positive way.
Dialogic reading has been shown to increase a child’s linguistic abilities, and it likewise could increase the second-language abilities of secondary-level students. When a teacher reads to students, she models the language and exposes them to linguistic patterns. When the teacher engages in dialogic reading, she can encourage her students to use their minds to create ideas in the new language, instead of hearing it only.
Motivation is also a variable in the language learning process. Small children are motivated to learn a language because they have an innate need to communicate. When adolescents study a second language in school, most often (in the United States at least) it is not taken to fulfill the need to communicate. It is usually taken as a requirement for grades, graduation, and/or making oneself more appealing to colleges (Yu, 2007). These are motivators, but they do not contain the same pressing need that a child experiences when learning how to express themselves. When teachers use linguistic immersion methods in their classrooms, this urgency is recreated in a small measure. There should also be an easy, relaxed, conversational environment, which encourages the students to use the language they are studying (Yu, 2007).
When teaching a secondary-level second language course, perhaps it would be beneficial to teach them a lesson on language acquisition. Since the students are most likely learning a foreign language for the first time, they would not have strategies to apply towards learning this new skill. They might find it interesting to learn how their brains worked as children. Then the class could discuss what would or wouldn’t work for them now that they are adolescents. The students could share their ideas on how linguistic acquisition could be modified to reach adolescents. The students could share their ideas and the teacher hers. Then everyone could approach the language class as something different than just learning another subject in school.
Adolescents are cognitively very different than young children learning their first language. Young children’s brains have a plasticity that is a fertile ground for learning language. And once they reach puberty, that plasticity hardens. Therefore, some of the stages of language acquisition would hardly be worth attempting because of the differences in the cognitive developments of babies and teens. Yet many aspects of language acquisition can be recreated to mimic the process of learning a first language when an adolescent is learning a second language. A secondary-level foreign language teacher should be aware of the process of language acquisition so she can adapt, apply, and even use it in her classroom.