DIAS Lecture: Is the younger, the better?

Teresa Cadierno, Professor of Second Language Acquisition at SDU and DIAS Chair of Humanities



Is the younger, the better? On the role of starting age and other factors in the acquisition of English by Danish primary school children



In this talk, I will present a research project that was funded by DFF in which we investigated the role of starting age of learning, i.e., the so-called age factor, and a range of other (child-specific and contextual) factors in the development of L2 English by Danish primary school children.



The project was motivated by an educational law in Denmark which stipulated that as of August 2014 English as a foreign language should be introduced in 1st grade instead of 3rd grade, which had been the norm since 2002.



In the project, we followed the development of L2 English in terms of learning rate and short-term proficiency by two groups of children who started learning English in schools in the same year (2014): an early starter group who began in the first grade (7-8 years old) and a late starter group who began in the third grade (9-10 years old).



In the lecture, I will present the design of the study, the factors that were examined and some of the project’s main findings.




Read more about Teresa Cadierno here






The lecture takes place in the DIAS Seminar Room, Fioniavej 34. Everybody is welcome and no registration is needed.