MSI Press Blog

  In earlier posts, we’ve talked about hares and tortoises in language learning—those classic learner types who approach fluency either in a burst of brilliance or with deliberate, measured steps. Today, let’s revisit the hares, particularly those who have found a comfortable resting place at Level 3, or “Professional Proficiency,” and seem quite happy to stay there. Hares, often synoptic, right-brain dominant learners , shoot ahead in language acquisition. They become impressively fluent very quickly. They can talk around vocabulary gaps with creative circumlocutions. They can paraphrase on the fly, improvise idioms, and charm listeners with their expressive energy. But what happens when the hare, having outpaced the tortoise in reaching Level 3, falls asleep just shy of the finish line ? This, as Ehrman points out in Developing Professional-Level Foreign Language Proficiency (Leaver & Shekhtman), is the phenomenon of level  fossilization . (There are other forms o...

  Most of us know the classic fable of the tortoise and the hare: the quick and confident hare bursts ahead, only to tire out, while the slow but steady tortoise trudges forward and eventually wins the race. What if I told you this same dynamic plays out in language learning? According to research by Leaver (1986) with diplomat students at the Foreign Service Institute, learners tended to follow one of these two paths based on their learning styles, as measured by the Torrance Test of Hemisphericity (left-brain learners and right-brain learners). The left-brain learners, referred to by Leaver as tortoises, started slowly, and plodded along with multiple short-term plateaus. These were the same types of learners who tested as ectenic on the later-developed, more sophisticated E&L Cognitive Styles Construct tool. The right-brain learners, referred to as hares, skipped merrily off, without plateauing, until reaching the pre-professional level, and then they reached a very long pla...