Key Findings

The goal of this book was to bring together and discuss from both a theoretical and an applied perspective, the results of a research project that was carried out in Switzerland between 2009 and 2015. Our work addresses the influence of age in interaction with other factors on the learning of English as a foreign language (EFL) in different foreign language (FL) programmes. In a nutshell, the results provided no clear evidence that there is any special advantage in starting the study of an FL very early. We found that, at the beginning of secondary school, the early starters' lexical knowledge and vocabulary in English was significantly better than that of the late starters. This discrepancy in lexical knowledge and vocabulary was big enough to influence the degree of crosslinguistic influence (i.e. native and FL lexical transfer) present in the output of the two age of onset (AO) groups. The late starters, who were less proficient in terms of lexico-semantics at Time 1, transferred more elements from their background languages (German and French) than the early starters, i.e. the more proficient learners.

However, after just six months, the late starters had caught up with the early learners (both the early classroom learners [ECLs] in the focal group and the early starters in the control group) and sometimes even surpassed them, e.g. in terms of oral and written morphosyntactic accuracy and complexity, syntactic fluency, grammaticality judgment and content-related and structural aspects of written expression. Thus, the early starters were not faster or more efficient at acquiring the different subskills which form an integral part of oral and written skills. The late classroom learners (LCLs) also proceeded at a faster rate when acquiring morphosyntactic forms and structures that were selected based on past research to cover the spectrum of difficulty for late second language (L2) learners, such as non-salient inflections and articles (Bialystok & Miller, 1999; Flege et al., 1999; Johnson & Newport, 1989; McDonald, 2000).