Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language
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Adults who want to learn a foreign language are often discouraged because they believe they cannot acquire a language as easily as children. Once they begin to learn a language, students may be further discouraged when they find the methods used to teach children don’t seem to work for them. What is an adult language learner to do?
In Becoming Fluent, Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuz draw on insights from psychology and cognitive science to show that adults can master a foreign language if they bring to bear the skills and knowledge they have honed over a lifetime. Adults shouldn’t try to learn as children do; they should learn like adults. Roberts and Kreuz report evidence that adults can learn new languages even more easily than children. Children appear to have only two advantages over adults in learning a language: they acquire a native accent more easily, and they do not suffer from self-defeating anxiety about learning a language. Adults, on the other hand, have the greater advantages—gained from experience—of an understanding of their own mental processes and knowing how to use language to do things. Adults have an especially advantageous grasp of pragmatics, the social use of language, and Roberts and Kreuz show how to leverage this metalinguistic ability in learning a new language.
Learning a language takes effort. But if adult learners apply the tools acquired over a lifetime, it can be enjoyable and rewarding.
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Richard Roberts, currently a foreign service officer in the US Department of State, taught psychology in Europe and Asia with the University of Maryland University College.
Roger Kreuz is professor of psychology and associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Memphis. Kreuz received his bachelor’s in psychology from the University of Toledo and his PhD in cognitive psychology from Princeton University.
P. J. Ochlan, an Audie Award-nominated and multiple AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator, has recorded close to 200 audiobooks. His acting career spans more than thirty years and has included Broadway, the New York Shakespeare Festival (under Joseph Papp), critically acclaimed feature films, and regular roles in television series. Along the way, he's worked with countless icons, including Jodie Foster, Clint Eastwood, Robin Williams, Al Pacino, and Garry Marshall.
