ABSTRACT
There are a few questions which have occupied language teachers for centuries and probably always will. Of these perhaps the most basic is ‘How does a person come to control a language anyway?’ We all achieved this feat with our first language, and many of us have gained some ability in other languages by studying them in school. The term ‘acquisition’ is sometimes used for the former, and ‘learning’ for what goes on in the classroom. There has been considerable discussion about whether these two processes are essentially the same, or essentially different. Until very recently, however, people have generally assumed that one followed the other with perhaps a few years’ overlap. The ability to ‘acquire’ supposedly died out at about the age of puberty, while ‘learning’ became possible only in the early school years as the necessary ‘readinesses’ developed.
