d. Rare is the person who loses his or her first-language accent in speaking another language learned after the age of fifteen or so. It is evident that the complex neural processing of language is intimately tied to cerebral maturation. Until a plateau is reached in the teen-years, the role of hemispheric dominance appears to be quite minor if at all discernible. Could puberty's hormonal revolution bring about a drastic deceleration of cerebral maturation concurrently with a more rigid (mature?) specialization and compartimentalization?
It is axiomatic in education that the teaching/learning process should start "where the child is." So, clearly, our first task as educators is to find out the potential level of acquisition, given a variety of factors which constitute the input--such as maturational level, intellectual level, affective receptivity, and home and school environmental conditions which foster or impede learning. Psychologists by and large agree that there are critical ages for learning certain patterns of behavior. The young child acquires linguistic and related communicative skills (such as body-language and ethnocentric behaviors) readily--by osmosis, as it were--without formal learning of the cognitive aspects of language. "Around age 12, cognitive development (Piaget's formal operations) involves a meta-awareness of thoughts and behavior and contributes to psychological feelings of vulnerability, self-consciousness, and reluctance in revealing self, which may disturb the language acquisition potential" (Krashen, 1979, p.100). It would seem, therefore, that puberty time is not ideal to start learning a second language, particularly if such learning imposes a radical change of linguistic structuration, script, culture, and conceptualization--as is the case in the Saudi Arabian curriculum. In light of this natural phenomenon, it is strongly advised that the learning of a second language begin at the earliest age...