Psychological Factors in Second Language Aquisition: Why Your International Students are Sudando La Gota Gorda (Sweating Buckets) Sandra Clyne Why is it so difficult and emotionally trying for adults to acquire a second language? What makes our international and newly arrived immigrant students sprout gray hairs and frown lines when they try to learn a lingua franca like English that could pave their road to academic and career success? At Bunker Hill Community College, where second language speakers often make up the majority of a class, what types of classroom management and teaching practices can be used to promote the development of students’ second language communication skills? Linguists have often pointed out that children in every culture all over the world manage to achieve communicative competence in their “first” or “native” languages — unless they have a specific language processing problem like autism or have been restricted to a developmental environment markedly deficient in language stimuli. After years of working with the language(s) in use within the home and immediate community, children become increasingly more fluent and effective in their command of the native tongue. Subsequent work within a school setting with a more abstract or decontextualized use of the native language — and with the addition of written as well as oral use of language — further strengthens the child’s communicative competence. It might at first glance seem logical that an academically well-prepared adolescent or adult who makes a “second” language an object of serious study could likewise achieve proficiency in that language without undue stress or emotional turmoil. But as any educator of new learners of English will attest, a smooth and seamless course is rarely the pattern for second language acquisition within a college setting. There are, of course, enormous cognitive differences between young adults and developing children, which could account for some of the difficulties college students encounter in mastering a second language. Linguists and educators like Eric Lenneberg and Derek Bickerton subscribe to the view that there is a biological timetable for optimal language learning which stymies the efforts of adolescents and young adults to acquire language. Theoreticians like Judith Strozer have applied this line of reasoning to second language acquisition and would predict a more difficult course for second language acquisition in adolescents and adults, as compared to children, due to differences in brain plasticity. An opposing pack of linguists downplay the role of the biological clock in second language learning. Most notably, Catherine Snow and M. Hoefnagel-Höhle have argued that adolescents, if studied systematically, actually can be shown to be the fastest language learners in all areas except pronunciation, with adults following and school-age children bringing up the rear (337-343). A possible explanation is that adolescents and adults can make use of their better-developed abilities for abstract logical reasoning (what Piaget would term “formal operations”) to achieve an analytical understanding of the new language being studied, while children can only reason about language in relatively concrete terms. Adolescents can add a child-like willingness to experiment and