Language Courses for Adults and Teenagers
Why adults and teenagers? Why not children? This is the science bit!
The reason why we design our home study and correspondence courses specially for adults and teenagers is because there is a fundamental difference between the way children learn a new language and the way adults and teenagers do; and it goes to the heart of what makes us human.
We humans are born pre-programmed to learn to speak whatever language we hear spoken around us.
Babies begin by cooing and babbling, learning the sounds, rhythms and inflections of their language.
Then our first infant words arrive and we start to say things like Dadda, Mamma, car, mine!
As toddlers we start to make up mini-sentences like Mummy there, Daddy play, my toy.
Before we’re five years old, we’re working out the rules and patterns of our native language, but we usually over-generalise and end up saying cute things like I treaded on it and my foots hurted.
By the time we’re between eight and eleven years old we’ve worked out the exceptions to the rules and know the 'correct' version I trod on it and my feet hurt.
Then as pre- and young teens we develop our vocabulary and our ability to use language appropriately, changing how we speak according to the person we’re speaking to.
This includes our ability to talk slang to our friends!
And at this age, pre- and early teenage, something happens in our brains: our pre-programmed ability to learn our native language, having done its job, simply turns itself off. No-one has ever been known to learn their first, native language after this age.
This is what all humans do, wherever we are born, whatever our native language is.
So adults and teenagers who want to learn a new language start at a major disadvantage to children because our native language learning mechanism has already done its work and has switched itself off – permanently.
The only thing that children need to learn a language is some input.
To learn a new language adults and teenagers need something quite different from children...
Adults and teenagers need:-
- A structured, gradual introduction to the rules and patterns of the new language, in English
- Vocabulary of the new language in context and explained, in English
- Lots of practice
- Monitoring to check we're getting it right
and of course
- Motivation: the desire to learn
Alcuin Languages easy-to-use courses are designed to give Adults and Teenagers everything they need to succeed in learning a new language.
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