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.

The sources of success reported by these students could have been anticipated in some cases and were quite unexpected in other cases. The three most commonly reported sources for success were time on task, perseverance, and instrumental motivation. 

Time on Task

The time on task factor could easily have been anticipated. The more time one spends on anything, the better one knows it or the better one can do it. That is an axiom that few will question. It is also a factor that has been found by many researchers to be an important element in learning success at any level of foreign language proficiency. Interviewee reports, however, also raised some questions. While all had spent many hours on their own outside the classroom in studying their various foreign languages, the polyglots reported something quite interesting. They had to spend less time with some languages than with others—and there were no clear patterns (at least not yet and not with this data set) as to why. One polyglot spent far more time on Russian than on French (Russian and French was a very popular combination of languages among the polyglots); another spent more time on French than on Czech to get to the same level. With flexible polyglots, i.e. those willing to change their approach to learning, depending on the foreign language, one pattern seemed clear: L3 required less time on task than L2, L4 less than L3, and L5 less than L4. This was not the case, however, with semi-flexible polyglots. (Inflexible polyglots were not found among the population used in this study.)

 Perseverance

A related factor reported by the interviewees in this study was perseverance. Contrary to popular perception, these highly capable language users were not necessarily highly capable language learners. That is, learning foreign languages was not always a matter of high aptitude (aptitude scores were not collected; most of the interviewees had never taken a language aptitude test) and great ease. In a number of cases, interviewees reported that they had been determined not to let the language get the best of them and had finally spent so much time on task that the language became their major or, for polyglots, their primary foreign language. Again, in the case of polyglots, some, who experienced difficulty with L3, L4, or L5, devoted so much time, attention, and psychic energy to a particularly troublesome language that they ended up attaining a higher proficiency level in that language than in other languages. 

Instrumental Motivation

Instrumental motivation was exceptionally strong among this group of foreign-language users. One advantage of instrumental motivation, of course, is that it does not let an individual walk away from an uncomfortable or difficult learning situation. In some cases, individuals had no choice: the language was critical to their job, and the better they knew the language, the better their job performance could be. In these cases, instrumental motivation, time on task, and perseverance were all facets of the same factor, critical to attaining near-native levels of foreign-language proficiency.

(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.

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