Daily Excerpt: Achieving Native-Like Second-Language Proficiency (Leaver) - Factors Related to Venue and Time (Factor 1: Childhood)

 



Factor 1: Childhood Experiences

 

      One somewhat surprising statistic that emerged from the interviews was that all of those learners who had reached level 4 had become acquainted with foreign languages very early in their life. That does not necessarily mean that they began studying those languages. In many cases, languages other than their first language were used in the family or community, and while the language learners themselves may not have picked up any of those languages well enough to speak them, they did gain one very important understanding that stood them in good stead throughout their days of subsequent language study: Languages are not exotica but rather everyday tools for communication.

The venues in which multiculturalism was met by the interviewees in this study included home, community, school, and work. Any one of these venues seemed to be sufficient to trigger the concept of “language as a tool” or “language as communication” that created the facility ultimately to use multiple tongues for routine and other business.

 

Family Home

 

      Since heritage learners were not part of this study, the family background was as often as not monolingual. In some cases (35 %), parents and/or grandparents spoke the language at home that was later studied. In other cases, immigrant grandparents spoke a language at home that was not later studied but the influence of hearing a foreign language made it seem natural for their grandchildren to study one or another language that they found interesting or useful for a wide range of reasons.

 

The Community

Two-thirds of the interviewees were raised in bilingual communities. Often, these communities produced polyglottic individuals, in which the second language of the childhood community had been acquired to a very high level at the same time that another language, frequently for work needs, had also been acquired to a very high level. Interviewees reported that this early multiculturalism prepared them well for language study.

Being surrounded by a bicultural or multicultural environment continued in adulthood for many of the interviewees, this time by choice. Of those interviewed, 57% reported traveling abroad on a regular basis (at least once a year), 62% were working or had worked abroad, and 48% had married someone who spoke another language.

 

School

 

Some, but far from all, the interviewees had attended school, where a language other than their L1 was spoken. In one case, the individual was the son of a diplomat; in another case, the individual was an orphan who was bounced from family member to family member in one country, then another. Some had more commonplace experiences of attending schools in bilingual communities where instruction was offered in both community languages.

As young adults, however, many of the Level 4 speakers (77%) had enrolled in foreign schools—not as study abroad students (only two speakers in the study had study-abroad experience) but as regular enrollees in undergraduate and graduate programs. All of those individuals felt that the foreign degree itself and the language improvement that was a byproduct of the work that went into earning it (i.e. papers that were corrected by subject-matter teachers not just for subject matter but for the foreign language itself) contributed significantly to their L2A success. In fact, if any one factor could be singled out from all others as highly critical to attaining Level 4 proficiency, this one might be it. The interviewees suggested that coping with the foreign classroom together with their foreign peers and without a support system from their home country was a very important contribution to their language proficiency and cultural understanding. In fact, being without a support system from home had its moments that were both frustrating and comedic, as in the case of one interviewee who had been treated so much like a local that he was sent to speech therapy because of his accent. (That seemed to work; today he has no foreign accent at all.)

 

Workplace

 

      All of the interviewees, when we interviewed them, were working at a job that required them to use one (or more) of their foreign languages.

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