Is there a “critical age” for developing second language proficiency?
Children of different ages learn in different ways. Younger children under the age of 8, though still needing structured support to learn L2, seem to acquire the pronunciation and patterns of daily grammar naturally. They achieve basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) seemingly effortlessly through play, television, and active engagement with the language through meaningful learning tasks that are designed for the specific goals of acquiring BICS. Children of this age have little usable first language proficiency that they can transfer into academic studies. Beyond the BICS level, these children often find L2 development to be a struggle. Their parents are often confounded by this plateau effect because the children “sound good” and appear to be fluent in English, though only at a conversational level. These children require on-going support and more time to develop L2. Remember that the academic words for a subject are specialized and also challenging for the native speaker.
