What do we know about individuals who reach near-native levels of proficiency in a foreign language? Desire for instruction/teacher!

 


Achieving Native-Like Second Language Proficiency (Speaking) by Betty Lou Leaver is a research-based catalogue of factors that would seem to predict ability to reach the highest level of foreign language proficiency and is based on common characteristics shared by more than 200 near-native speakers, identified by self-report, survey, and interviews by master testers.

There is a well-spread and strongly believed myth that learners beyond professional levels of proficiency do not need a teacher. On the contrary, say these 200+ near-native speakers, they did have teachers at higher levels; they strongly felt that having a native speaker-teacher at high levels pushed them further faster because there was someone to explain the unwritten, unspoken, unanticipated aspects of language that they would not have noticed and that flies over the heads of learners even as high as professional level. Learners reaching for near-native cannot know what they don't know, but a native speaker can fill in the unseen cracks. Nearly all of the learners in the study emphasized the important of instruction to and through near-native levels.

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MSI Press publishes the only journal dedicated to the topic of teaching and learning to near-native levels of foreign language proficiency: the Journal for Distinguished Language Studies (JDLS). 

We have available for individual purchase each of the feature articles from issue 8 of the JDLS at a very accessible price and will make the feature articles available from other issues as time goes on. Check our webstore to see what we have at any given time. We will announce and link each of these individually in upcoming blog posts.

The Journal for Distinguished Language Studies is available by subscription. JDLS is a biennial journal, and it is easy for time to slip by and miss the next issue. Subscription will take care of that. Subscribe HERE and never miss a copy. (Publishes typically in December of even-numbered years.)

Also, don't believe Amazon's listing of previous issues of The Journal for Distinguished Language Studies as out of print. It is very much in print and available at the MSI Press webstore. Subscription service available as noted above, and issues 1-6 are on sale for $5 each!


Amazon is selling issues 7 and 8.

For more posts about the JDLS, click HERE.

For more posts about near-native language acquisition, click HERE.

If you have a post to contribute to the Thursday high-level-language-proficiency topic, we would love to see it. Please send it to editor@msipress.com.


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