Age

This chapter begins by questioning whether age is an individual difference in the usual sense of the term. It argues that age needs to be seen not just in terms of physical maturation but as a macro variable, very much tied up with motivation and context. It also takes issue with the Period Hypothesis (CPH), propounding that the unfalsifiability of this hypothesis in naturalistic situations has to do simply with the effects of multicompetence, which remove any possibility that competence in more than one language can ever be identical to monolingual competence. With regard to L2 teaching, it points to many decades of research showing that, in a normal schooling situation, younger beginners in the long run do worse than adolescent beginners. Its general conclusions are that we should cease obsessing about the CPH critical period hypothesis and that primary-school L2 provision should seek new ways of exposing learners to L2 input.