Participants and Research Design: Four Independent Samples

As briefly mentioned in Chapter 1, the data in question were collected during seven academic years when two curricula coexisted in Switzerland and we were able to test early and late starters of English as a foreign language (EFL) who were in the same secondary schools with the same teachers and teaching materials. We recruited three different groups: 100 early learners of EFL and 100 late learners of EFL for the focal group (longitudinal design); 100 immersion students (50 early and 50 late starters) to test for instruction effects; and 100 students who belonged to the fifth generation of early learners in Switzerland. Note that simultaneous and sequential bilinguals (n=436) were excluded from the analyses here as they were treated separately (see Pfenninger, in prep.). In the following, we are going to describe each group in detail.

Characteristics of the focal group

Two groups of subjects formed the focal group in the longitudinal part of this study: a group of 100 learners of EFL with an age of onset (AO) of 8 (early classroom learners [ECLs]) and a group of 100 learners with an AO of 13 (late classroom learners [LCLs]). Of the 200 participants, 103 were female and 97 male. They were clustered in five state schools in 12 classes, ranging in size from 9 to 22 members. Table 2.1 displays information about the schools and classes, while Table 2.2 shows information about the subjects.

One of the four schools was in a suburban area, while the others were in urban school districts. The first test series was administered after six months of EFL in secondary school, that is, after 440 hours of instruction (ECLs) and 50 hours of instruction (LCLs) respectively. The second data collection took place five years (680 hours) later. At no point were early starters mixed with late starters in the same class. This presents the advantage of there being no blurring effect of mixing ECLs and LCLs in the same class.