SOCIAL CONSTRAINTS ON ADULT LANGUAGE LEARNING

In a somewhat different vein, Krashen has suggested that the close of the critical period may be related to Inhelder and Piaget’s stage of formal operations, which is believed to begin at about the time of p~berty.~,~ It is claimed that this is the period when the child begins to formulate abstract hypotheses in order to explain phenomena and the time when he wants general solutions to problems rather than merely ad hoc solutions. The tendency of adolescents to construct theories may inhibit “natural” language acquisition, with the result that adolescents and adults no longer are able to avoid constructing a conscious theory of the language they are learning. Whether the emphasis is placed upon neurofunctional maturation or upon Piagetian stages of mental operation, these arguments point to maturational changes that turn the postadolescent into a different kind of learner than the younger child, but others have been more impressed with the social and psychological factors that hamper adult learning. In his book The Pidginization Process, John Schumann offers us a case study of an adult Costa Rican worker in the United States who made very little progress in English.6 Schumann attributes the worker’s low achievement to what he calls the “social and psychological distance” of the learner from speakers of English.6 As factors of social distance that can affect the rate of learning, Schumann cites the political, cultural, technical, and economic dominance relationships between the two language groups; the degree of assimilation desired; the cohesiveness of the groups; relative size of the