MSI Press Blog

Most language learners aim for fluency. Some even reach what’s called Professional Level Proficiency —that sweet spot where you can function in a workplace, navigate nuance, even toss in an idiom or two. But those aiming beyond that—toward near-native proficiency —often find themselves mysteriously stuck. Stalled. Plateaued. Why? The answer, according to Shekhtman (in Developing Professional Level Language Proficiency ), lies in one of the most stubborn and often ignored culprits in language acquisition: grammatical fossilization . He breaks down language use into three categories: Automatic-correct Automatic-incorrect Not-automatic Ideally, we all move from not-automatic to automatic-correct. But what often happens instead? Learners get comfy with automatic-incorrect. These are speech habits that have been internalized—and once they're habitual, they’re hard to undo. That's grammatical fossilization: the incorrect gets baked in, and it won’t unbake itself . Fossilization: Y...

  Today's book excerpt comes from  Working with Advanced Foreign Language Students  by Boris Shekhtman . Some Characteristics of Advanced Language Learners  SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF ADVANCED STUDENTS   Student-Language Relations So, what does having an advanced student mean to a teacher? It means, of course, that the student already speaks the foreign language with finesse, that the student already knows the host country pretty well, along with its history and culture, that he or she has seen quite a few foreign language teachers before now. (Typically, the advanced student has studied, if not mastered, several foreign languages [Belcher and Connor, 2001; Leaver and Atwell, 2002] and has already developed his or her own ideas about how to learn a foreign language [Ehrman, 2002; Leaver and Shekhtman, 2002].)  Language Learning Motivation and Goals  The advanced student is extremely motivated; rarely do such students study a language simply, so t...

  (photo by Frank Perez) Today is Tuesday. Time to tall turkey. Monday's madness is over, and Wednesday will take us over the hump, so Tuesday it is--for some serious discussion with authors. Tuesday talks mean to address authors in waiting and self-published authors who would like to go a more traditional route or who would at least like to take their steps with a publisher by their side. Today's topic is about errors typically found by copyeditors. Some of them will not be picked up by spellcheckers. Avoid these to impress acquisition editors. Word Choice. The words that you use portray a picture of you as an author. The most successful authors choose their words well. The verb to be i s not your best friend, but when you read the manuscripts of many authors who would like a publishing contract, you wonder if they know any other verbs at all. Linking verbs provide no action, no definition, no story. They just connect two nouns, making the sentence static. Replace all the link...