What do we know about individuals who reach near-native levels in a foreign language?

 


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.

Polyglots were an interesting subgroup. While the aggregate of information from bilingual individuals provided an interesting and insightful panoply of approaches to foreign language study, the polyglots offered even more interesting information. Contrary to expectation (and a priori hypothesis), most of the polyglots approached the learning of different languages in different ways.  Individuals who spoke 3, 4, and 5 languages at Levels 3-4+ sometimes acquired Romance languages in one way, Germanic languages in another, and Slavic languages in a third. Sometimes the differing approaches were influenced by specific teaching methods of classrooms in which they were studying. Other times, the influence seemed to be entirely internal, connected in a not totally definable way with such characteristics as language distance, reason for studying that particular language, and emotional experience. Yet other times the environment for learning dictated the difference. The lengths of time taken to acquire language initially (i.e. at lower levels) was longer for Category III and IV languages than it was for Category II languages, generally, for speakers of English. At the same time, as one might expect, learning a second language in the same family was reported as taking far less time than it took to learn the first foreign language in that same family.

            The information reported by polyglots makes a strong case for teaching different languages in different ways, underscoring the differences found among foreign-language users who had acquired only one foreign language at a high level.

(We will report on other characteristics in future Thursday blog posts.)

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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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