Early English Language Influence

Introduction

The following review focuses on de Wolf et al.’s study Influence on Early English Language teaching on Oral Fluency. First an overview of the study with its background will be presented. A second section will then be dedicated to a closer view on the study and how it was carried out. Then, we will deal with a critical evaluation of the article, and then a conclusion will be given.

Background

Taking into account the increasing attention second language learning and teaching is getting, de Wolf et al. tried proving when and what kind of input is better to learn an L2, as is, English. Since the European Council demanded more action in the field of multilingualism in 2002 so kids would improve their skills in foreign languages, the

There is this general idea which says that the sooner a learner starts learning a foreign language, the faster they will acquire oral fluency, which, as proved in this study, is not true. It was interesting that the study focused on this topic, since the European council started a foreign language teaching program based on that assumption. Their paper, therefore, helped see that when the student starts, does not really make a difference if other variants are not taken into account like motivation and exposure. Accordingly, instead of making kids starts at an early age when they are not interested nor motivated to do so, maybe, the European council, and schools, should focus on having the necessary teaching methods and material to start teaching the language when the students will not only make the effort to learn it, but also make the most of their resources like reading or watching TV in

Instead of asking how many days a week, ask for the number of hours. It is not the same being exposed to it 30 minutes 3 times a week, than 2 hours 3 times a week. For future research, it would be interesting to have 2 groups formed by early starters and late starters and expose them to the ideal foreign language learning program. As presented in this study, the program would consists of getting enough instruction in class (3 to 5 hours a week) and extensive exposure to input (more than 1 or 2 hours a week), plus out-of-school exposure. By controlling these factors, the results of the study would show whether starting earlier really means becoming fluent faster, or not, and it just depends on motivations and other factors. Also, as mentioned in de Wolf et al.’s study, early learners did outperform late learners in 2 out of 11 measures, but given some time, it would be interesting to see if both groups of students reached the same level of fluency since late learners seemed to have achieved almost the same level as early starters in a matter of 1-2 years, while early starters had been exposed to the foreign language for 6