Myth 5-
"Older EL students will have a more difficult time developing academic English"
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Older EL students will have a more difficult time developing academic English: NOT TRUE!!
It is a common misconception that while younger learners do have many advantages to language acquisition, research focused around learning a second language at an older age has proven to be ambivolent. Older EL students bring different strengths to the table than younger EL students.
Age does not prevent one from learning a new language. People at different ages merely acquire language differently.
STRENGTHS OF OLDER LANGUAGE LEARNERS
Cognitive: Older learners are more self aware and therefore understand their learning styles better than a younger student will.
Experiential: Life experiences provide older learners with more to draw upon to make connections to the new language being acquired. Additionally, older EL students who are multi-lingual often find that this previous knowledge of languages is a helpful tool to learning English.
Contextual: Older learners are more likely to comprehend and discern higher level academic language than a younger learner. Older learners often perform better on vocabulary assessment than younger students do.
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