While it could be predicted that both children and adults have their respective advantages and disadvantages, the advantage of one group may not be true to all its members. And the difference in one aspect between two children or adults can be greater than that between an average child and adult. The task for an individual, therefore is to develop her strong points, whether they are personal or age-related, and avoid her weaknesses. .
The comparison is going to be made by the following criteria: (1) cognitive factors of [A] learning strategies; [B] native language interference; [C] rote learning ability; [D] capacity for concentration and (2) affective factors of [A] motivation; [B] self-consciousness and anxiety. Other factors that also are involved in the language learning process are left out either because they almost remain static with different ages, such as learning styles, or because they are irrelevant to the issue in question, such as attitude toward the target culture(s).
(1) Cognitive factors.
[A] Learning strategies.
` It is generally agreed by scholars that adults use more learning strategies than children do. "Adults have greater cognitive abilities than children." (Gass: 245) " The adult has a set of formed cognitive skills and strategies that should make the FLL task easier," according to Crystal (p. 373) However, whether the cognitive skills and learning strategies facilitate or inhibit final success is still being debated about. Some of the strategies are believed to enable the adults to be test wise and others only compensate their weaknesses. For example, when an adult has difficulty in memorizing new words, she may either memorize them many times or build some connection between the new words and known ones. The memorizing strategies are adopted simply because she is unable to remember it like a child. "Ironically, adopting the cognitive abilities in a language-learning task has been hypothesized to result in less successful learning than found in children.
