ABSTRACT
Learning to speak a foreign language involves much more than learning to pronounce words in that language as well as its native speakers. As every student of a foreign language will attest, however, a native-like or at least near native-like accent is one of the first things that all foreign language learners wish to acquire. Indeed, language teachers never tire of telling their students how important it is to speak a foreign language with a native-like accent. Unfortunately, only a small number of learners, even after years of hard work, will ever manage to acquire a near native-like, let alone nativelike, accent. This can prove to be frustrating for adult learners, because young children learn to sound like native speakers in a very short period of time and with little effort or no formal instruction. There may be a number of reasons for this apparent ‘inequality’. For example, young children are less inhibited than adults are, and tend to regard learning foreign languages as some kind of fun game or play. Thus children are less anxious about making mistakes than adults are. (Perhaps adult learners have a lot to learn from children, when it comes to learning foreign languages.) Children are also said to have more neuro-muscular ‘flexibility’ than adults, which may perhaps explain their seemingly effortless acquisition of a native-like accent.
