What do we know about individuals who reach native-like 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.
Contrary to popular belief, far from all the interviewees, including the
polyglots, were good classroom language students. One remembers receiving a D
in a college Japanese course and being told to give up on languages and take an
easier course. In a bygone day (clearly), a French professor threw a book at a
current Level-4 speaker of French in exasperation at her then very strongly
non-Parisian accent. A near-native speaker of Russian got C after C in college
Russian courses and was gently encouraged to consider other languages. Many of
the interviewees reported frustration with their early language-learning
experiences. Although ultimately successful, along they way they encountered style conflicts
Sometimes early lack of success was a matter of friction between the teacher’s teaching style and the student’s learning styles, what Lavine, Oxford, and Ehrman refer to as style wars. Of course, this is not something that most interviewees could identify. Rather they described situations that the interviewers, who have researched and written extensively on the topic of learning styles, recognized as conflicts in style. This, of course, was not across the board. Some students certainly did have an easy time of language acquisition from start to finish. From what we can determine from the limited information we collected on learning style (for example, interviewees were not asked to take a learning styles test of any sort but were allowed to self-report—something that we may change in future data collection), the individuals who had experienced difficulties fell into two camps: ectasis (ectenic learners) and synopsis (synoptic learners), to use the E&L Cognitive Styles Construct.
Semi-Flexible Polyglots
Some polyglots,
particularly native speakers of English who had first learned one or more
Romance or Germanic languages (which have many features in common with English,
including meaning being rooted in sentential syntax, rather than in other
grammatical elements, such as, for example, morphology), experienced difficulty
in learning more exotic foreign languages, such as Russian, Japanese, and
Arabic. What appeared to happen was that these learners tried to use the same
strategies and approaches to truly foreign languages that they had used with
commonly taught languages. Here is evidence that languages *are* different and
are best learned (and taught) in language-specific ones, i.e. one size does not
fit all, contrary to the claims of some advocates of contemporary teaching
methods who have limited or no personal experience (see Wong and VanPatten,
2003, for an example of this fallacy and Leaver et al., forthcoming, for a
response to it). Ultimately, polyglots who experienced difficulty with their
third, fourth, fifth, or in some cases, sixth language but later acquired it to
a high level reported that they have to learn it in a different manner. In
other words, they became more flexible. Those who did not make this adjustment
did not experience ultimate success. For example, a Level 4 speaker of Speaker
was unable to acquire Russian to Level 4 but was able to do so with French. A
Level 4 speaker of Russian was unable to acquire Japanese to that level and was
struggling with Arabic, as well, but was able to acquire French to Level 4.
On the surface, it
might appear that polyglots were able to acquire “easier” languages more
rapidly than “hard” languages. However, that does not seem to be the case from
the few cases we have encountered so far in this study. There are those who
have acquired Russian to near-native levels but were unable to do the same in
Spanish.
Clearly there are many
possible explanations for the reasons of lack of success. Determining the
overall patterns is difficult because the combinations of languages are very
unique to individuals, and it is very difficult to find hundreds if polyglots
are defined in the way we have defined them in this study: those who possess
two or more foreign languages at near-native levels of proficiency.
Methodological Conflicts
Many of the
interviewees who reported lack of success in early levels also reported
disliking their classrooms. Some exploration showed that there may have been
methodological conflicts at that time. Some of the obvious conflicts were
Introverted learners (Jung, 1971) being forced to work in group activities,
explanations being withheld from deductive learners, lack of time to explore on
their own being encountered by inductive learners, a push to perform before
they were ready being experienced by reflective learners, among others. Once
these students got past the early levels and were in smaller, more
learner-centered classrooms, they were able to experience greater success. In
some cases, learners sought their own learning opportunities by hooking up with
tutors. A number of the high-level learners claimed to have learned much of the
very high levels of their language skills through informal tutors—native
speakers with whom they spent a lot of time and to whom they could address
language questions or get help with language tasks.
(We will report on other characteristics in future Thursday blog posts.)
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