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.

Following up on previous posts, one of the motivational frameworks considered was instrumental vs integrative motivation. Had there been an a priori hypothesis for motivational issues in this study, the interviewers would have hypothesized that integrative motivation would dominate among highly successful learners. The results, however, were very much the opposite. In fact, a very decisive 82% identified their motivation as instrumental, whereas only 38% identified theirs as integrative. (As with the extrinsic-intrinsic model, some interviewees reported motivation from both categories.)

Instrumental Motivation

The overwhelming orientation of the interviewees, at least at the latter stages of their language acquisition study, was toward instrumental motivation—the pattern became clear very early into the study of this population and has not changed as more individuals have been added to the pool. Even among study participants who had worked side-by-side with representatives of the second culture for years, there were many individuals who did not seek any kind of integrative experience, although it would have been very easy to establish. One individual, in fact, who had had many successful interactions on a long-term basis with the foreign culture said that he found the culture “unsavory.” Another said that she had no desire to eliminate her slight accent because she identified with her home country and had only learned the foreign language for the opportunities that knowing it could afford her. Contrary to popular wisdom, ethnocentricity, in fact, did not impair a number of the interviewees from reaching near-native levels of proficiency and the concurrent cultural understanding that it requires.

When asked about integrative motivations, some did have them. Many though, did not, and pointed out that if their desire had been simply to integrate with the population, they could have stopped their language-learning efforts at Level 3. At that level, they could interact in normal ways at work, as well as in society. They could live comfortably within the society, although they would still be using a lot of circumlocution and divination on topics that they had not encountered before. Still, they could accomplish anything they needed to at that level and not only were accepted by members of the society but also were praised for their language skills. Level 3 was a very attractive for them. Moving on to Level 4, by contrast, brought some negative emotions into play in their interactions with native speakers, ones that were somewhat demotivating (see the discussion on demotivation below). Some pointed out the number of immigrants in any country, who have lived in-country perhaps most of their lives, but whose speech is far from near-native. Their explanation of this phenomenon was that these people were never required to develop the sociolinguistic and linguistic refinement needed for Level 4 proficiency because they never had to make formal presentations or publish in the language—requirements associated with work demands. These were the kinds of motivations that pushed them [the respondents] to reach the higher levels.           

Integrative Motivation

A small set of individuals did mention motivations that would appear to be integrative in nature. They wanted to (1) get along better with members of the culture on a personal basis, (2) blend in at work, and/or (3) become part of the culture because of long-term fascination with it. While there were not enough subjects in any given L1-L2 combination to draw conclusions, there were some definite trends in respect to integrative motivation:

• Learners of English who had emigrated to the United States were generally integratively motivated (plenty of opportunity to achieve integrative gratification in an English-speaking matrix);
• American learners of a European foreign language were more likely to be integratively motivated than American learners of other languages; and
• American learners of a language spoken in a country generally considered to be hostile to the United States were not at all likely to be integratively motivated.

 (We will report on motivation in greater depth and on other learner 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). 

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