This article addresses age-related attainment effects in second language acquisition, posing the question of whether such effects are to be explained in terms of a Critical Period with a predictable and abrupt offset point or in terms of the impact of a wider range of factors. It attempts to explore this question by focusing on four discussion points in the current debate: (i) the wide use of native-speaker behaviour as the key L2 attainment yardstick; (ii) the degree of compatibility of prevailing views regarding the notion of a critical period for L2 acquisition; (iii) the relative narrowness of much research in this area, where age of L2 onset is often regarded as the crucial if not the only critical variable; and (iv) insights relative to maturational constraints on language acquisition offered by recent brain research. The article concludes that a loosening of the association between ultimate L2 attainment research and Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) issues would shed more light on L2 attainment in terms both of the comprehensiveness and of the acuity of the insights which would result.

The project Early Language Learning in Europe (ELLiE) has studied the longitudinal effects of an early foreign language (FL) start in seven European contexts. This article presents a sub-study of ELLiE that investigates the impact of out-of-school factors on learners' listening and reading skills in year four of formal FL instruction. More specifically, we include parents' educational level, parents' use of the FL professionally, exposure, interaction and cognate linguistic distance. Data were collected by means of listening and reading tests and a parents' questionnaire. Results of the statistical analyses show that cognate linguistic distance was the strongest predictor of both listening and reading scores, followed closely by exposure, and parents' FL use at work and international interaction at some distance. Parents' educational levels only impacted on reading scores, and domestic interaction did not have any effect on listening or reading. Furthermore, the results confirm previous research on young learners' incidental FL acquisition through watching subtitled films, as watching films was the most powerful exposure type for both listening and reading. Parents' use of FL at work correlated significantly with exposure, indicating that the influence of parents would have an effect on the opportunities for their children's FL exposure.

The effects of age on second language acquisition constitute one of the most frequently researched and debated topics in the field of Second Language Acquisition. Two different orientations may be distinguished in age-related research: one which aims to elucidate the existence and characteristics of maturational constraints on the human capacity for learning second languages, and another which purports to identify age-related differences in foreign language learning, often with the aim of informing educational policy decisions. Because of the dominant role of theoretically-oriented ultimate attainment studies, it may be argued that research findings from naturalistic learning contexts have somehow been hastily generalized to formal learning contexts. This paper presents an analysis of the symmetries and asymmetries that exist between a naturalistic learning setting and a foreign language learning setting with respect to those variables that are crucial in the discussion of age effects in second language acquisition. On the basis of the differences observed, it is argued that the amount and quality of the input have a significant bearing on the effects that age of initial learning has on second language learning. It is also claimed that age-related studies in foreign language learning settings have yielded significant findings that contribute to the development of an integrated explanation of age effects on second language acquisition.

Given that summer abroad programs are becoming more and more popular, the aim of the present study is to find out whether foreign language proficiency can be significantly improved during a summer stay of 3-4 weeks. The present study examines learners’ linguistic gains through oral fluency and accuracy measures as well as a listening comprehension task. Learners’ oral fluency is examined in terms of syllables per minute, other-language word ratio, filled pauses per minute, silent pauses per minute, articulation rate, and length of the longest fluent run. The accuracy of learners’ oral production is measured by means of the ratio of error free clauses and the average number of errors per clause. In addition, learners’ errors are classified into 4 categories: morphological errors, syntactic errors, lexical errors and covered errors. Results reveal that these short stays do indeed produce significant gains on most measures, and that proficiency level strongly affects the intensity of learners’ progress

The present study focuses on the influence of starting age and input on foreign language learning. In relation to starting age, the study investigates whether early starters in instructional settings achieve the same kind of long-term advantage as learners in naturalistic settings and it complements previous research by using data from oral performance. In relation to input, this study examines and compares the relative impact on learners’ oral performance of different input measures: number of years of instruction, number of hours of curricular and extracurricular lessons, number of hours spent abroad in an English-speaking setting, and current contact with the target language. Film-retelling oral narratives from 160 learners of English are analysed in terms of fluency, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity. Correlational and regression analyses show that input has a stronger association with measures of oral performance than starting age, and that cumulative exposure and, above all, contact with high-quality input are good predictors of learners’ oral performance in the foreign language.