What do we know about individuals who reach near-native 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. Some surprises in the data arose when the researchers compared how successful learners approached one language differently from another. This was the case not only with different learners but also the same learner studying different languages. The brought into question the one-size-fits-all teaching methodology that tends to be bandied about today, particularly at low levels of proficiency. Taking Russian for example, the data provided by the Level 4 language users showed that students studying Russian differed in very specific ways from those studying English or Romance languages, i.e. as Russian professors of...