t language and adults learning a second language is the contextual support for learning" (p. 15). Success for both children and adults depends to a very great extent on this "contextual support", i.e.on how the external environment is perceived by the child. An authoritarian classroom climate may lead to learning (through coercion--however disguised in "cognitive methodologies"), but hardly leads to acquisition and creative communication. In other words, the competence gained through coercive methods (as so perceived by the young learner) may be adequate for getting an "A" on a test and even pass State examinations, but does not make for open communicative and social interchanges and for an understanding of the foreign culture--perhaps language's major functions. A democratic (which does not mean "demagogic"!) and supportive environment, on the contrary, does lead to acquisition as well as learning, and to an appreciation of and adaptation to the cultural setting of the second language and of its native speakers. The authoritarian approach may transit forms, patterns of language which the learner may be able to reproduce particularly well in a like authoritarian setting (such as school tests and examinations), but it does not allow for hypothesis formulating and testing, for experimentation, for creative construction, i.e. for the very basis of communicative language acquisition.
Clearly, a tolerant environment permits the making of errors and corrects them unthreateningly. A focus on errors diminishes the child's self-confidence, casts the target-language and its exponents (including the teacher) in a negative light which tends to block or at least discourage learning. Thus, the environment must offer frequent, if not constant, opportunities for meaningful and pleasant (positively motivational) communication, which involves constructive and nonthreatening error correction.
In children, "semantic development is slow" (Spolsky, 197...