MSI Press Blog

  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...

  excerpt from How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately by Boris Shekhtman -  TOOL #5: BREAKAWAY There is a second tool which can enable us to say what we really want to say. To understand the functioning of this tool, we have to understand the dynamics of knowing two languages. There is a very interesting relationship between these two languages, determined by the extent of the foreigner’s knowledge of the second language. In fact, if the foreigner knows the second language as well as he or she knows the first, it is possible there will not be any dependency at all between the two languages. These languages can exist independently of one another. Our foreigner can turn on the first language, or the second one, at will. But the relationship between these two languages can become complicated very quickly if our foreigner does not know second language as well as the first. In this case, the foreigner, as he or she encounters deficiencies in speaking the second language,...

  On June 6, we celebrate Russian Language Day, choosing this year to honor Aleksandr Pushkin, the literary giant who shaped modern Russian. Yet, Pushkin’s linguistic journey is filled with irony and legend—some true, some perhaps embellished over time. Truth: Pushkin’s First Language Was French Pushkin was born into Russian aristocracy, where French was the language of the educated elite. He spoke French before Russian, a fact that adds poetic irony to his role as the father of modern Russian literature. Despite his fluency in French, Pushkin’s deep engagement with Russian folklore and his nanny, Arina Rodionovna, nurtured his love for the Russian language. Eventually, he pioneered a writing style that blended classical and vernacular Russian, making literature more accessible to the people. Legend: Pushkin Mistakenly Used Feminine Verb Endings A persistent legend among some linguists (and students at the University of Moscow/MGU when I was a student there eons ago, it now se...

Excerpt from  Think Yourself into Becoming a Language Learning Super Star Memory, Forgetting, and Lapses   Just to reinforce the matter—or in case you are skipping around in this book and did not see the earlier memory discussion; there are three stages to memory: awareness/attention, encoding/storing, and recall/retrieval. In this section, we are focused on what happens after you have learned something and need to use it. When you want to remember, you will need to recall the information you have learned. One of three things he can happen, and we have all experienced all three: we remember it perfectly (yippee—hope that happens always, but it does not), we remember it imperfectly (oh, too typical), or do not remember it all (even if we remember having spent time studying it). Knowing what has happened in each case, brings us to a point of orienting our study and actions for better recall, as well as teaching us not to beat ourselves up when we have a glitch or lapse. Reme...

Precerpt (excerpt prior to publication) from My 20th Language by Betty Lou Leaver, Ph.D. -- Introduction In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a polyglot—although I have formally and informally studied twenty languages, the most recent being Indonesian, which I undertook over a three-week period at the age of seventy-four. After this intensive study, I spent four weeks in Indonesia conducting faculty development in English for limited English speakers at a government institution. During my time there, I found myself needing Indonesian in countless practical situations: communicating with drivers, navigating train stations between Bandung and Jakarta, checking into hotels, and—perhaps most memorably—combining various nouns with "tidak berfungsi" (does not work) when dealing with hotel staff in Bandung. I helped my co-teacher order at restaurants, asked for directions (or more typically, how to get back to where I started, given my exceptional directional challenges),...