There are a number of commonly held beliefs about age. Some people say that children learn languages faster than adults do. They talk of children who appear to pick up new languages effortlessly. Perhaps this has something to do with the plasticity of a young brain. Something, after all, must account for the fact that with language, according to Steven Pinker, ‘acquisition… is guaranteed for children up to the age of six, is steadily compromised from then until shortly after puberty, and is rare thereafter’ (Pinker 1994: 293), and that applies not only to the acquisition of the first language, but also to second or foreign languages.
Another belief is that adolescents are unmotivated, surly, and uncooperative and that therefore they make poor language learners. And there are those who seem to think that adults have so many barriers to learning (both because of the slowing effects of ageing and because of their past experience), that they only rarely have any success.
There is some truth in many of these beliefs, but they can also be misleading since, like all stereotypes, they suggest that everyone is the same. They also ignore evidence from individuals within these groups (adolescents and adults) which flatly contradicts such assumptions. We should also point out that many of concerns in this section will have special relevance for the western world where, for example, it is stressed that children should “learn by doing” and where some generalizations can be made about adolescent behaviour. But as we shall see in Chapter 6B, different educational cultures have very different expectations about teacher and learner behaviour.
In what follows we will consider students at different ages as if all the members of each age group are the same. Yet each student is an individual with different experiences both in and outside the classroom. Comments here about young children, teenagers, and adults can only be generalizations. Much also depends upon individual learner differences and motivation (see B and C below).