Daily Excerpt: Achieving Native-Like Second Language Proficiency (Leaver): Preface

 

Excerpt from Achieving Native-Like Second Language Proficiency

PREFACE

Contrary to popular thought in some quarters, learning languages to very high levels of proficiency, i.e. those very close to those of native speakers, is, indeed, possible. Not only is it possible, it is done on a routine basis by a number of learners, not only in other countries, but in the United States, as well. True, the numbers in the United States are not large, but they are sufficient enough to show that it can be done here, as well as in countries of Europe, Eurasia, Latin America, and elsewhere. Further, there are some very skilled teachers quietly producing these levels of proficiency also on a regular basis.

      The problem is not the ability to teach to native-like levels of proficiency in direct instruction programs or the ability to learn to native-like levels of proficiency, given the appropriate help and experience. Rather, the problem lies in the all-too-pervasive mindset that high levels of proficiency cannot be achieved in American classrooms by American students learning with American teachers, that for some reason, after the Intermediate level of proficiency, students can only learn by themselves. Somehow, the ludicrousness of such thinking has not yet entered the minds of teachers, legislators, the press, or the general populace. Imagine if one were to say that all American children could only learn English through the level of about a five-year-old with any kind of direct instruction and that all high-level literacy skills could only be learned through some form of independent study and community service experiences. Where, indeed, do native language literacy skills come from? From direct instruction! Preschool children’s language skills in their native language are about on a par with those of learners at Advanced levels of proficiency in a foreign language, albeit fluency of preschoolers might be higher and vocabulary will be different. Both students, at this point, are in need of developing literacy skills and erudition. Both are in need of direct instruction to do so. That is readily admitted when it comes to a child in his or her native language. It is not so in the case of the foreign-language learner. Why? Could it be the mythology that surrounds higher levels of proficiency, most frequently promulgated by those who have themselves not attained Superior or Distinguished levels and consequently judge everything by their own Advanced (or even lower) level experience.

      This contradictory thinking that is currently prevalent in the United States, the need for the United States to have highly proficient linguists both for national security and for the capability of becoming a more competent player in the areas of international business and diplomacy, among other needs of an economy that is growingly globalized, and the fact that little research is available on the ways in which students do achieve near-native proficiency, whether on their own or through instructional programs led to the proposal to conduct this current and ongoing study. The early results (the first 55 interviews) are discussed in this volume. While these results could probably be considered representative of the larger group, the larger group being a small one, indeed, readers should still consider them preliminary.

      Actually, like with everything else, there was an evolutionary, not revolutionary, path that led to this study. That path started many years ago, in 1984, at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). At that time, the United States was locked into a Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the FSI, where I worked at the time as the Russian Language Training Supervisor, was constantly pressured by Congress and even the press to produce ever more competent speakers of Russian among its diplomatic students. The comparison was always made to one or another highly competent speaker of English assigned to the Russian Embassy in Washington. At one point, a study was commissioned by Congress (informally called the Stearns Study because Ambassador Monteagle Sterns was assigned the responsibility for conducting the study) to compare foreign diplomatic training with that of the US, with the hope of finding ways of improving US training. The upshot of that study was simply that the nature and quality of American language training was not the point of difference between the language capabilities of American and Russian linguistic capabilities, but the amount of training and the ways in which diplomats were assigned to posts and positions throughout their diplomatic careers. American assignments were not based on becoming expert in one language and one location but in one kind of job; therefore, American diplomats studied language after language during their careers—and that approach continues to this day.

      Nonetheless, a very forward-looking dean at the FSI, Jack Mendelssohn, decided to push forward the possibility of training American diplomats being assigned to Russian to reach Level 4 (Advanced Professional, Distinguished, Native-Like, Near-Native—there are many “names” for this level) in the classroom in a short period of time. Under my direction, Boris Shekhtman (currently president of the Specialized Language Training Center) and Natalia Lord (FSI) spent six months developing the framework and materials for a course to take diplomats from Level 3 to Level 4. The course was planned for 6 months of study and required that diplomats have a current Level 3 proficiency level and at least two years of in-country experience. (By way of comparison, the SLTC offers private Russian-language training that takes students from Level 3 to Level 4 in 720 hours of study.) This course was remarkably successful, and in the six years that it was taught, no student who met the prerequisites and stayed for the full six months of the course failed to reach Level 4. Some reached Level 4+. (See Leaver and Kaplan, forthcoming, for a detailed description of this course.) With time, the course gained a French partner, and today the FSI offers two courses at this very advanced level: the Beyond-Three Russian Course and the Beyond-Three French Course.

A few years ago, in 2000, Boris Shekhtman and I, realizing that the few people in the “business” of teaching high-level foreign language skills neither knew each other nor had any venues at foreign-language conferences for sharing and learning information on this topic, decided to collect descriptions of high-level programs for a volume that was published in 2002 by Cambridge University Press (Leaver and Shekhtman, 2002a). Our search for “those in the know” took us to many continents, and we quickly found out that the United States had a dearth of high-level programs and a need for a cadre of teachers who could develop them.

In late 2000, Boris and I drew up a plan for a national center for building a cadre of teachers skilled at teaching in programs that had high-level goals such as Level 4 and 4+. We subsequently made the rounds of academic institutions and language-oriented organizations, looking for a home for this center. In early 2002, we found a home, and the Center for the Advancement of Distinguished Language Proficiency (ADLP Center) was founded at the San Diego State University under my direction. An Advisory Board composed of leaders in the academic language-learning committee was established. The ADLP Center continues today to be a vibrant in the Level 4 discussions and work, under the direction of Mary Ann Lyman-Hager and Christian Degueldre.

Subsequent to the founding of the ADLP Center, which concentrates on Middle Eastern and Romance languages, a similar center was established at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in late 2002. This center focuses on Asian languages: Distinguished Language Center-Asian Program.

As months (not years) passed, a national interest in how to get students to near-native proficiency emerged—and is continuing to grow rapidly. It was very obvious that a national center was needed that would pull together all these interests, i.e. that one university-specific center could not do it alone, and so the Coalition of Distinguished Language Centers (CDLC) was founded, and all institutions working in any way in the area of high-level study were invited to join it. To date, those institutions include the ADLP Center at San Diego State University, the Distinguished Language Center-Asian Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER) at Penn State University, the Center for Language Study at Yale University, and the Specialized Language Training Center in Rockville, Maryland. The Monterey Institute of International Studies gave a home to the CDLC in late 2002, and in early 2003 a CDLC Washington Branch for Instruction opened at Howard University.

Most of the Advisory Board members (identified in at the CDLC website: www.distinguishedlanguagecenters.org) from the ADLP Center took on the additional responsibilities of providing guidance to the new, national coalition. To that group of individuals experienced in teaching in or supervising Level 4 programs, along with representatives from such organizations as American Councils for International Education, American Council on Teaching Foreign Languages, Defense Language Institute, Foreign Service Institute, and the National Foreign Language Center, were added a few additional individuals with Level 4 experience in order to broaden the language base to nearly any language that is taught. Among the Board members are also those with experience in study abroad situations and those with experience in heritage language learning.

      The CDLC has two convictions: (1) Americans—or anyone, for that matter—can learn foreign languages to near-native levels, and (2) given a trained national cadre of teachers, students can (and should) be brought to these levels in classrooms, combined with well-designed foreign study programs during the direct instruction component of student learning. The role of direct instruction—it is the experience of most CDLC members that Level 4 is generally reached faster in the classroom than through independent study and that independent study alone is generally slow, inaccurate, and, often, unsuccessful in getting students to very high levels—is one of the important pieces of information sought by the CDLC in continuing to research just how Level 4 (and higher) is attained.

      Since its inception, the CDLC has held two national conferences, open to anyone with an interest in the topic, and to the best of the knowledge of the CDLC staff, these have been the only national, open conferences on this topic. We hope that it, along with the growing number of publications of the CDLC, will spawn panels for the discussion of high-level language learning and teaching at a number of national and international conferences. We have seen, coincidentally perhaps in some cases and as a direct result of our activities in others, efforts by others that have developed in the wake of the initial Leaver-Shekhtman proposal to found a national center, to address issues of Level 4 learning. Specifically, in 2001, the National Foreign Language Center held a symposium to define the components of high-level reading, based on a recently acquired contract to develop materials for student practice at Levels 3 and 4 in a variety of languages—those materials can be found at the LangNet site: www.langnet.org. The American Council of Teachers of Russian has some materials on its RussNet site for high-level learners: www.Russnet.org. More significant, the topic is now being discussed on more of a routine basis; it is only a matter of time until the teaching of high-level skills takes its place on the national agenda, alongside that of teaching at lower levels.

What is needed in order for this to happen and to happen successfully? First, the attraction of this idea, which is strong, is not enough to make sure that appropriate, successful programs are established. One needs to have knowledge and experience in this area. For that reason, a very important goal of the CDLC is to add to the knowledge base (hence, the current and ongoing study of factors involved in successful attainment of high-level skills). Second, those who lead the initiatives really do need to have personal experience either in teaching at high level or in attaining Level 4 or higher proficiency personally. Those without such a background often retard the forward movement, even while thinking that they are leading the pack, because they introduce many myths into the discussion. One such myth is the idea that independent learning is necessary (and even the best approach) to reaching Level 4; the study of learners who have reached this level indicates otherwise (the reasons are given in detail in the chapters of this book). Another myth is that study abroad is the only route to developing Level 4 proficiency; again, the research shows otherwise—while study or work abroad is essential at some point, it is most helpful at lower levels of proficiency and is a key factor in reaching Level 4 proficiency only when a learner is enrolled in a foreign university program where he or she is in courses only with foreign counterparts and has to meet the same requirements—in this way, he or she gets direct language instruction as a by-product of having to write papers and tests and participate in classroom presentations. A third myth is that early onset learning and heritage study is the only hope; among the dozens of individuals in the study related in this book were a great many who began their study as adults, and, surprisingly, those who began as children did not reach Level 4 at a younger age or in a shorter period of study than did those who began as adults. There are other myths that this study exposes as assumptions and not fact. The reader will find them in the chapters of this book.

It is my hope that readers will not only begin to understand the nature of teaching and learning to Level 4 but also will understand that building the high-level teaching component into language programs will require much more research, a search for quality results (not just funding of disjointed, or single institution, projects that are not particularly related to each other), and most important, a group of experienced, dedicated people working together in a coordinated fashion, with the research and activities of one person or one group of persons informing the movement as a whole. The information presented here is just a start, a drop in the bucket of what we need to know. Moreover, it is not filtered through a large population—there is, to the best of my knowledge no such large population in existence. What this book does is present an overview of the factors that were mentioned over and over by respondents; it is presents individual comments that were particularly representative of the overall picture.

      Some aspects of the study reported on in this book have already appeared in publications of the American Council of Teachers of Russian (Leaver, 2001), Cambridge University Press (Leaver & Atwell, 2002), and the Journal for Distinguished Language Studies (2003). This book, however, is the first place where a full range of factors are discussed in detail in this way.

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