Simone E. Pfenninger is Assistant Professor at the University of Salzburg. Her principal research areas are multilingualism, psycholinguistics and individual differences (e.g. the age factor) in SLA, especially in regard to quantitative approaches and statistical methods and techniques for language application in education. Recent books include Beyond Age Effects in Instructional L2 Learning: Revisiting the Age Factor (2017, co-authored, Multilingual Matter), The Changing English Language: Psycholinguistic Perspectives (2017, co-edited, CUP), and Future Research Directions for Applied Linguistics (2017, co-edited, Multilingual Matter). She is co-editor of the Second Language Acquisition book series for Multilingual Matters.

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Mapping the Terrain

Chapter 2: The Current Empirical Study

Chapter 3: Age and (Statistical) Analysis

Chapter 4: Age and Rate of Acquisition

Chapter 5: Age and Affect

Chapter 6: Age and Cross-Linguistic Influence

Chapter 7: Age and Impact of Differential Input

Chapter 8: Age and Educational Implications

Chapter 9: Conclusion and Future Perspectives

References

Index

This book constitutes a holistic study of how and why late starters surpass early starters in comparable instructional settings. Combining advanced quantitative methods with individual-level qualitative data, it examines the role of age of onset in the context of the Swiss multilingual educational system and focuses on performance at the beginning and end of secondary school, thereby offering a long-term view of the teenage experience of foreign language learning. The study scrutinised factors that seem to prevent young starters from profiting from their extended learning period and investigated the mechanisms that enable late beginners to catch up with early beginners relatively quickly. Taking account of contextual factors, individual socio-affective factors and instructional factors within a single longitudinal study, the book makes a convincing case that age of onset is not only of minimal relevance for many aspects of instructed language acquisition, but that in this context, for a number of reasons, a later onset can be beneficial.