Birgit Harley
Dec 1, 2000
Citations
1
Influential Citations
42
Citations
Quality indicators
Journal
TESOL Quarterly
Abstract
* How the age of the learner affects the acquisition of an L2 is an issue that remains controversial (see, e.g., Birdsong, 1999; Harley & Wang, 1997; Singleton, 1997). Whereas most studies of this question have focused on comparing the relative success of learners who began to learn the L2 at different ages, the study reported here is concerned with learning processes at different ages. Its goal is to gain a new understanding of the listening strategies that younger and older L2 learners use to comprehend spoken English. Earlier research with native speakers of English (Harley, Howard, & Hart, 1995; Read & Schreiber, 1982) had revealed that, when listening to oral sentences in English, children 7-8 years old were most attentive to prosody-that is, the information provided by the intonation and stress patterns of the sentences-whereas adolescent and adult native speakers were more likely to attend to syntactic cues to sentence structure. Among Cantonese-speaking learners of ESL, however, different findings emerged (Harley et al., 1995). Children in three different age groups (in Grades 2, 7-8, and 11-12) all focused most heavily on the prosody of the English sentences they were asked to listen to. One interpretation of the study involving Cantonese speakers is that the listening strategies used by L2 learners of English are the same regardless of age. But it is also possible that the LI of these learners made