Stuck at Level 3 (Professional Level Proficiency)? Think Interlanguage!

 

The consensus across ILR documentation, second‑language acquisition research, and government training notes is that between ILR 3 (“Professional Working Proficiency”) and ILR 4 (“Full Professional Proficiency”), interlanguage doesn’t disappear, but it changes character: errors become rarer, more subtle, more stylistic, and increasingly tied to register, discourse norms, and sociolinguistic expectations, not grammar or vocabulary gaps.

🌱 What Happens to Interlanguage Between ILR 3 and ILR 4?

1. The Big Picture: The Interlanguage Shift

At ILR 3, learners still have a stable interlanguage system with:

• Residual grammatical errors
• Occasional lexical gaps
• Register mismatches
• Non‑native discourse structuring
• Pronunciation that is intelligible but not native‑like

At ILR 4, the learner’s interlanguage becomes:

• Highly stable, highly automatized
• Error‑rare, but not error‑free
• Native‑norm–oriented, especially in formal registers
• Sensitive to genre, audience, and pragmatic expectations

In other words:
The system doesn’t vanish—it becomes “native‑compatible” rather than “native‑noticeable.”

2. 📌 What ILR Itself Says (Indirectly)

The ILR scale doesn’t explicitly discuss “interlanguage,” but the descriptors imply the shift:

ILR 3 (Professional Working Proficiency)

• “Sufficient structural accuracy”
• “Participate effectively in most conversations”
• “Understand essentials of all speech in a standard dialect”

This implies:
Errors still occur, but they don’t impede professional communication.

ILR 4 (Full Professional Proficiency)

• “Fluent, accurate, and appropriate”
• “Errors are rare and do not interfere with the message”

This implies:
Interlanguage persists, but errors are infrequent, subtle, and often stylistic.

3. 🧠 What SLA Research Adds (the part ILR doesn’t say)

A. Error Type Changes

Between ILR 3 → 4, errors shift from:

• Morphosyntactic → to discourse‑pragmatic
• Lexical gaps → to collocational nuance
• Pronunciation deviations → to prosodic non‑nativeness
• Register mismatches → to genre‑specific expectations

B. Fossilization vs. De‑fossilization

Research shows that:

• ILR 3 learners often have fossilized patterns (stable, persistent errors).
• ILR 4 learners show de‑fossilization, but only in domains they use frequently.

This is why ILR 4 is often achieved only by:

• Long‑term immersion
• High‑stakes professional use
• Explicit feedback from native peers
• Extensive reading and writing in formal registers

C. Cognitive Load Changes

At ILR 3:

• High‑level tasks still require conscious monitoring.
• Errors appear under stress, speed, or unfamiliar topics.

At ILR 4:

• Monitoring is mostly automatic.
• Errors appear only in very unfamiliar or highly specialized contexts.

4. 📚 What Government Training Notes Say (summarized)

Although not in the public ILR descriptors, internal training materials (FSI, DLI, NSA) consistently note:

ILR 3 → 4 is the “register mastery” jump.

Learners must:

• Control formal, informal, and highly formal registers
• Produce native‑like cohesion and coherence
• Use idiomatic and culturally appropriate phrasing
• Understand implicit meaning, hedging, and rhetorical norms

Errors that remain are:

• Stylistic
• Pragmatic
• Collocational
• Genre‑specific

5. 🧩 Why This Jump Is So Hard

ILR 3 → 4 is often described as:

• “The plateau”
• “The professional ceiling”
• “The native‑norm barrier”

Because:

• Grammar is no longer the issue.
• The challenge is cultural cognition, discourse norms, and native‑like processing speed.

This is why many highly educated L2 speakers plateau at ILR 3+.

6. 🧭 So What Actually Happens to Interlanguage Errors?

They become:

• Less frequent
• Less systematic
• Less noticeable
• More tied to sociolinguistic nuance
• More context‑dependent

They do not become:

• Zero
• Native‑identical
• Fully eliminated across all registers

Even ILR 4+ speakers may retain:

• Slight accent
• Occasional collocational oddities
• Slightly non‑native rhetorical patterns
• Minor pragmatic mismatches

But these no longer affect professional performance.

For more posts on language learning, click HERE.

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