Age of onset, motivation, and anxiety as predictors of grammar and vocabulary outcomes in English as a foreign language learners with developmental language disorder.

Introduction: Like children with typical language development, their peers with developmental language disorder (DLD) are expected to learn English as a foreign language (EFL). For pupils without DLD, it is well-established that amount of informal exposure to English outside of the classroom, starting age of EFL instruction and motivation are strong positive predictors of EFL learning rate and/or achievement, whereas anxiety is negatively related to performance. This paper is the first attempt to investigate how these predictors of EFL performance operate in learners with DLD.