Anca Maria Slev, Variables in Language Learning. Age, Bilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Emotions – Casa Cărţii De Știinţă, Cluj Napoca, 2020

By studying the variables of age, bilingualism, identity, and emotions on second language learning/teaching, the author identifies methods likely to optimize both students’ second language acquisition (SLA) and the teachers’ approaches. The pertinent conclusion is that both teaching and acquisition of English as a second or third foreign language are shaped by multiple concomitant factors including the students’ age, their cultural identity, emotions, as well as their being bilingual or multi-lingual. Especially novel and illustrative for the author’s contribution to the field is the survey of monolingual versus bilingual students in higher education institutions from Transylvania, the latter coming from mixed Romanian-Hungarian families. Given these students’ cognitive development and experience with a wider range of sounds, i.e. metalinguistic awareness and communicative skills, they tend to outperform their monolingual peers in terms of cognitive flexibility, phonetic sensitivity, metalinguistic awareness and field independence - they generate larger structures which also include incorrect sentences, but which allows them to progress faster than monolinguals.