Starting early in EFL: Does it really make a difference?

Abstract

Research on the effects of age in foreign language learning suggests that it does not make much difference whether students start learning when they are four, six, eight, nine or eleven years old. The GRAL Language Acquisition Research Group www.ub.edu/GRAL co-ordinated by Carmen Muñoz at the UB, has been researching the effect of the starting age on foreign language learning for more than 12 years. In Spain, thanks to the co-existence of two different systems, it was possible to compare students who started learning English when they were 11 with students who started when they were just 8. The results of GRAL research clearly show that at the end of high school, after the same number of classes, the group of learners who started when they were 8 did not outperform those who started when they were 11. It is the group of older learners who outscored their younger peers in tasks such as understanding a text, writing an essay, telling a story, and doing grammar tests. An early start was not beneficial in terms of grammar, vocabulary, oral or written skills. This conclusion is consistent with findings from international foreign language acquisition research.