A synthesis of empirical research on the linguistic outcomes of early foreign language instruction

ABSTRACT

Early foreign language (FL) programmes have grown rapidly worldwide in the past two decades, resting on the assumption that ‘earlier is better’ for learning a FL. However, the majority of empirical studies that investigated the ‘earlier is better’ hypothesis were conducted in naturalistic immersion contexts. Given the substantial differences in the quality and quantity of input and instruction, whether or not the results in immersion contexts can be generalised to FL learning contexts remains unknown. The current study aimed to fill this gap by reviewing and synthesising 42 empirical studies published in the past 50 years that examined the age of learning effect in FL learning contexts. Overall, the synthesis revealed no solid evidence for a younger learner advantage in short-term or long-term linguistic outcomes. We conclude with implications for research and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Early foreign language education
• formal classroom instruction
• age of learning effect
• research synthesis
• critical/sensitive period

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Educational Testing Service under a postdoctoral fellowship award. I thank Xiaoming Xi and the reviewers of the International Journal of Multilingualism for their helpful comments on earlier drafts, and Rachel Adler, Melissa Lopez, and Paige Vetter for their research assistance. All the remaining errors are my own responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing our attention to this study.

2. We did not further divide multiple-time-point studies by the type of outcomes (ST vs. LT) because all of them examined both outcomes.

3. Because many studies included in the synthesis did not report information about other variables that can potentially influence FL learning, such as details of the FL curriculum, quality of the instruction, and FL teacher qualifications, we were not able to conduct a detailed analysis of the included studies to discuss what circumstances/variables may or may not render effective early FL learning. Future investigations of the predictors of successful early FL learning will help address this question and inform FL instruction and education policy. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.