MSI Press Blog

  Research confirms what many polyglots intuitively know: there is no single path to near-native fluency. Even for the same learner, the journey can vary dramatically depending on the language, the context, and the resources available. My own experience with French and Russian illustrates this vividly. French: A Community-Fueled Glide I learned French in school, but the real advantage was my bilingual environment. Though my family remained firmly rooted in the anglophone community, I was surrounded by French-speaking stores, schools, and workplaces. That ambient exposure made supplemental study effortless—I could walk into a local shop and buy French books, which I devoured. French felt intuitive. Despite its Romance roots and English’s Germanic lineage, the historical influence of French on English created unexpected bridges. Cognates, syntax echoes, and shared idioms made the language feel familiar. My formal education reinforced this ease: a review of French grammar as the...

  Many language learners plateau at Level 3—Professional Proficiency—not because they lack motivation or exposure, but because they’ve unknowingly become trapped in a phenomenon known as linguistic fossilization. Fossilization refers to deeply ingrained errors in grammar (morphology and syntax), vocabulary, intonation, and pronunciation. These errors persist despite continued use of the language, often because they’ve been repeated so frequently that they become automatic. And here’s the catch: Level 4 proficiency demands not just fluency, but accuracy—a level of precision that fossilized habits simply can’t support. The late Boris Shekhtman, a revered Foreign Service Institute instructor and author of How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately , was a master at helping learners break free from this linguistic quicksand. He coined the term “self-drilling” to describe how learners inadvertently reinforce errors through repetition. His solution? Drill correct forms two to thr...

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...