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Xiru Ma
ENG1201
Dr. Cassel
Dec 16 2019

What Are the Factors Influencing Second Language learning?

In China, all students are now required to learn English as a second language from

primary school in cities. Some rural countries may start a little bit late. Back in the 2000s,

children at my age began to learn English as our second language at the age of 13 in middle

school. Our English prociency turned out to be different. I have always wondered why there

were such big gaps in the proficiency level since my generation started at around the same age.

In this situation, is it the time we spent on second language learning, or the resources, such as

foreign teacher at school that could teach us once or twice a week, that made all the differences?

Comparatively, the newer generation seem to have less accent and speak more fluently English

when they have had started English learning at an earlier age. Does age play an important role in

second language acquisition? It seems so. Is it because of the worldwide trading that makes

English the official language, so everyone wants to adapt to this trend and become more

competitive?

I have long been interested in this topic, so I made a research on it. It was no surprise to

find that both observational and experimental studies concerning what factors would influence

second language learning had been conducted. Age, distance between first and second language,
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sociocognitive perspective, motivation, personality, and attitudes etc are all considered to be

factors that influence the second language acquisition.

There has been a long history in theory development of how age affects second language

acuiquisition. Since the 1950s, researchers began to reserch on what was the best age to start

learning a second language. In 1959, Penfield and Robert proposed that from both the

perspectives of neurology and physiology, children were believed to have more advantages than

adults in second language acquisition. The younger we were, the more elastic our brains were.

"The acquisition of a second language later in life is fundamentally different than acquiring it

early," said Joy Hirsch, a professor of neuroscience at Cornell University Medical College. As

was mentioned in The age factor in second language acuqisition, there were good positive

indications of an early start in second language acuqiition, especially the conceptual aspects. It

was suggested that neurophysiology should be taken into account in the future, coming both to

the field of research and education. Organs and muscles were not fully developed in children, so

they could adapt to the pronounciations easily; while adults already had formed muscle

structures, which made it hard to change when they wanted to pronounce words in a different

language system. Moreover, adults seemed to already developed a formal instruction and error

correction system, which made it hard for them to input second language causally. I can relate to

this point strongly. Chinese is my native language, which is different from English and varies a

lot from Spanish, too. Although I can speak English and understand it, I often find some words

hard to pronounce. Spanish is way much harder for me to learn because some words need the

specific muscles, which is not very well developed on me since I grew up learning and using

Chinese.
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In the 1960s, the criticial period theory became a heated topic. It advocated that full

native competency of a languge happens during a period of time, normally considered before

puberty. Children were believed to be much faster language learners, compared to the adults.

Children did not seem to have a lot of difficulty in mastering a second language. They could

achieve high levels of proficiency, no matter in accent, vocabulary or morphology. The results of

study suggested that after puberty, a native accent seemed no longer attainable. Adults were also

believed to be able to have a high proficiency. However, it was extremely hard for them to get

rid of their original accent. In this case, age would have been an important factor in deciding the

proficiency of second language acquisition.

After that, tons of researched had been conducted to analyze the differences of the

abilities of language acuquisition between adults and children.

In the initial stage, because adults have better logic and abstract minds, they are better at

imaging and making conclusion. Older children learn better than the younger ones because

children’s abstract minds grow maturer when they are almost tweleve years old. Comparatively,

younger kids are weaker at that. In 1979, Krashen, Long and Scarcella proposed that under the

same conditions, when adults and children were both given traning of pronounciation and

grammar, adults showed faster learning at the initial stage. According to their theory, adults

seemed to have more advantages in second language learning, which opposed the crictial period

theory. However, most scholars still believe that children are faster learners, which I personally

agree with. I know some immigrants that moved to the U. S when they were at the age of 15.

They were in high school. They could speak very good English. However, even myself, also an

immigrant, can still tell they have accents. It is hard for us to gain a full native competency when

we start learning a second lanaguge after puberty. But compared to those who do not live in the
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U.S or have no or little resources in their life to access to American culture or talk to Americans,

the immigrants were obviously more proficient English learners. It is because the immigrants

were under the influence of sociocognitive persoective, proposed by Atkinson.

Atkinson redeemed that each individual’s mind, body, and the world we live in were

interacting, and impacting so as to form a ecological circuit. Our coginitive, physicial and social

activities were closely related, rather than independent. He believed that language acquisition is

the mind-body-world continuum. We learn because we are trying to adapt to the continuously

changing society, so we all have to communicate with others, and the social and physical world.

We are given repertories of participation. We get involved in coordinated interaction with the

socialcognitive affordances. Individuals have their multiple roles and identities. For example, we

are not only students, but also teachers, mentors, someone’s partners, sisters and brotehrs. We

are trained and influenced in various situations, such as we speak differently in offices and at

home; we speak differently when we are angry and happy. All these interactions affect our

language learnings. Sociocognitive system and processes are also important. Culture model is

one example. When immigrants come to the U.S, they were gradually affected by the American

culture. People tend to greet when they meet each other. Meanwhile, back in China, we do not

really talk to strangers. Saying Hi to someone we do not know is weird. Also, when we are

immerged in the environment, immigrants tend to see, listen and speak more, we would master

the second language much faster. My friend’s child, who is around 14 years old, is proficient in

both Chinese and English. At home, he could be immerged in the Chinese-speaking

environment. When he goes to school and in other circumstances, he has to speak English, so he

is good at both of them. Intercation and environment obviously matter a lot, especially when he
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is born here. He almost had both the advantages of starting learning second language at an early

age and sociocognitive perspectives.

The distance between our first lanfuage and second language also influences our second

language acquisition. For example, significant differences exist between Chinese and English,

which makes English a challenge for Chinese learners. (Shoebotton, 2011). With 56 nations

having their own dialects in China, it is almost inevitable to get affected by the regional accents

when picking up language in China after puberty. Even we all speak Mandarin, but when we

come from different regions, we differ a lot. Those who are from the south have a softer tone,

such as Cantonese. Those in the northern part of China, such as Beijing, have a stronger tone and

sounds more aggressive although they do not mean that at all. Researches have shown that when

there is more similarity between our first language and second language, the acquision is usually

more easier. (Chiswick& Miller, 2005). To illustrate, English is considered to be more similar to

western languages, such as French and German. American can learn German faster than

Japanese and Koreans do, normally. At the same time, Asian are relatively more capable of

learning Asian languages. I learned Japanese faster because the Kanji in Japanese that is quite

similar to Chinese. Before I came to the U.S, I taught Chinese as a second language to

foreigners, mostly westerners in China. I found that the alphabet X and R were hard for them to

pronounce. My name Xiru has both of the alphabets, so it was very difficult for westerners to say

it. My previous boss, who was an Italian, found it so hard that he had to ask me whether I can

have an English name, which would be easier for him to say and remember. However, for

Japanese and Korean leaners, my name was so much easier to call.

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What esle would also affect second language learning? One easy answer is motivation.

When we think about all those real life events going on, motivation is definitely a big effecor.

Most of the times, we get something because we want it.

In psychology, there is a rule called the Law of Attraction, which means when we want

something to happen, we can think about it hard, and believe that it will happen and then mostly,

it will. This concept is the same as motivation to me. No matter what we do, we need to have

motivations and believe that it will happen.

Krashen, who was the representative of innatism, which emphasized the innate genes and

abilities to learn language, advocated one of his theories, called affective-filter hypothesis. From

the perspective of psychology in second language acquisition, large amount of understandable

language input does not mean that the students can learn a second languge very well. The level

of prociency one can gets is also dependent on affective related factors. In other words, not only

the language itself, but the emtions related to the language, either about the culture or any

experience we have are hampering or encouraging us to learn this language. These factors

include: motivation, personality and emotional status.

Motivation is about whether the student has a clear target and is determined to achive the

goal set by himself or herself. For example, some students learned English hard in high school

because they began to understand that contemporary world asked one to be competitive, and they

may also need to study overseas and wanted to overcome this difficulty in languguge to better

communicate and pave their future road. Motivation would directly influence the effects of

learning. Bigger motivation and clearer goals mean faster mastery.

Personality is agreed by almost all researchers to affect the efficiency of second language

learning. It is concluded that extraverted, outgoing, talkative and confident students are more
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willing to put themselves in an environment that they are not familiar with, and share ideas with

others so as to practice more while learning to adapt to the new environment. Extraverted

students tend to feel safe and comfortable even when making mistakes. They do not fear

judgement. In this situation, we would say that these students’ filter levels are low. Intraverted

students are said to have a higher filter level. They are more likely to be conservative and

reserved to stay in his or her comfort zone. They are reluctant to seek opportunities to collaborate

with others and they always feel nervous and worry that they would be judged. Even if we did

not do any research, we have the common sense that language needs to be practiced. However,

the research result is also supporting this idea.

The last but not the least in this affective-filter device is the emtional status. Generally

speaking, it is mainly the two statues: nervousness and relaxedness. Students can learn faster and

master more information when they are studing in a relaxed mood, and nervousness stopped

them from trying; fearing making mistakes stopped them from outputting. When the affective

filter is high, the learners feel emotionally unsafe, which builds higher imaginary walls that lead

to less successful language acquisition.

I grew up hearing my teacher saying that we had to have good attitudes to whatever we

do. “Attitudes toward the language and culture, including the desire to sound native, and

intention to reside long term or permanently in-country (Kinsella & Singleton, 2014)” is also

important. Many students gave up learning English as a second language when I was in middle

school because they did not think it would be useful for them, just like those who thought math

was only useful when they went shopping. In this way, obviously, students had no motivation.

Their bad attitudes made it hard for them to have any advances. As was mentioned above,

attitudes include the desire to sound native. Although I can speak and listen to my second
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language, English well, I do not sound like native speakers. My attitude had been like this:

language is a tool for communication, only if I am able to communicate, I am fine. However,

recently I have been trying to slow my speaking and imitate others’ pronounciation, so I can

sound more like Americans. Attitudes, to some extent, dertermine how far we will go. When it

comes to second language learning, it influences us on how native as foreigners we will sound

like.

This research has given me a better idea of what factors are influencing second language

acquisition. Because I also learned psychology, physiology and anatomy, I found this topic more

interesting. How physiology: the development of our brain, where sitting the Borca’s area, the

center that regulates language learning; and psychology: personality and attitudes combine

together to affect our second language aqcusition. I would definitely encourage a dual languge

learning to help children become more competitive and open minded in the future. Of course, it

is not always applicable, and there are lots of things we should pay attention to, but at least we

can try.
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Works Cited

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