Reaching High Levels

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reineke
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Reaching High Levels

Postby reineke » Sat Jun 16, 2018 7:23 pm

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Re: Reaching High Levels

Postby rdearman » Sun Jun 17, 2018 9:54 am

I thought this was a very telling paragraph:

On average, learners with six months or more of targeted classroom instruction at the upper levels of proficiency and at least two years of in-country experience were able to shorten the average time-on-task for acquiring near-native proficiency from 17 years to five, including the time spent at lower levels of proficiency.


Especially for people who beat themselves up for not getting to C1/C2 level after studying at home for 5 years or so.
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Re: Reaching High Levels

Postby tarvos » Sun Jun 17, 2018 10:54 am

Oh so that's why I am still shit at all my languages!
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Re: Reaching High Levels

Postby Cavesa » Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:09 pm

A great thread thanks. And nice quotes!
reineke wrote:
In all cases, we asked about length of study. In the first instance, the average length of study from rank beginner to near-native language user was 17 years; in the second instance, 12 years. Why does it take so long? Must it take this long? What are those “bumps” on the road to near-native proficiency that increase the time on task that individuals have reported?

Vast majority of my bumps and slow downs happened at the beginner and lower intermediate phases. So, it is not just something specific top people having reached the high levels. Truth be told, getting from B2 to C2 French was much easier than getting to B1, due to external factors.

And what the paper seems not to have focused on: some of these complications are purely artificial, caused by education systems, teachers, schools. Slowing the faster students down, slow progress "to not leave the slow learners", or the complications we all know that arise with switching coursebook series, teachers, or class, all that matters. Months and years of time are being lost on the way.


AVAILABILITY OF RESOURCES AND OPPORTUNITIES

A surprising finding when first it appeared, it is now a given in the literature on the development of high levels of foreign language proficiency that there is no clear guide to reaching near-native proficiency, that there are as many paths as there are students (Leaver, 2003a; Mueller, 2003). In fact, in the case of bilingual and trilingual learners, there is rarely consistency even between how L2 was learned and how L3 was learned (Leaver, 2003a). The primary reason for this had little to do with desires, plans, methodologies, or learning styles, but rather was far more pragmatic and based on the way personal lives and careers had unfolded. This natural phenomenon affected such issues as study abroad, language practice, and direct instruction.
Reduction Agency’s (DTRA) Russian language course].

Does the original paper expand on this?

It looks like this paragraphs has little to do with the headline.

I would wholeheartedly agree. It is not just about the differences in the individual needs though. In various languages, there are simpy few or no resources for people trying to bridge the area around B2. These learners lose a lot of time trying to find something suitable, as they are too advanced for most courses and not that advanced to use just native resources proficiently. Let's not forget that even the French learners had nothing at the B2-C1ish level just seven or eight years ago.

Geoblocking is not helping either.


LANGUAGE ATTRITION

Life and career paths that veered from intensive language use over time may lead to language attrition, particularly among those whose full-time job did not involve the consistent use of 1-2 languages; i.e., non-interpreters/translators. Lawyers, for example, who had to use Spanish with clients fared better than business consultants who provided advice to business abroad. Some respondents who had a good understanding of the ILR scale reported that their tested Level 4 proficiency dropped as low as 0+ or 1 in their assessment. However, when they knew that they would need to use the language, it often took less than a week of full-time study to recoup their skills at the ILR Level 3. Their assessments match my experience as well as that of diplomats with whom I worked at the Foreign Service Institute ...

Very true. I can see it on myself quite clearly. Fortunately, it is also true that high level languages are faster to recover than the low level ones.


LANGUAGE FOSSILIZATION

In the forward-march phase of high-proficiency foreign-language acquisition, language fossilization, which, counter-intuitively speaking, can occur in a classroom when students’ interlanguage develops faulty categories and concepts, is one of the biggest bumps. For students who have spent much time abroad, fossilized error can become entrenched. This is the reason direct instruction is needed or at least highly helpful. Teachers need to replace bad habits with good, a task no less arduous than giving up tobacco. Generally, fossilization requires drilling – it warrants natural “drilling” (i.e., repetition of language used incorrectly) to inculcate the entrenched error in the first place. Most teachers working at the upper levels of proficiency study agree (Shekhtman, 2003). Research (Leaver & Atwell, 2002) supports anecdotal experience: without meaningful drilling (i.e., contextualized, personalized, presented to self-aware learners), automatization of correct forms will take months or years, if it ever occurs at all. In addition to fossilization of errors in grammar and vocabulary choice, another form of fossilization occurs on the way to the ILR 4: fossilization of language simplicity; i.e., the lack of development of language sophistication and synonymy in expression. Once students have learned one, usually simpler, way of expressing an idea, they often feel uncompelled to express that idea in a more sophisticated way, expected of someone with greater erudition. They fossilize into a “comfort zone,” typically around Level 3. Again, direct instruction is often required to de-fossilize these students....

Yes, this is directly against the popular trend these days, to just tell people to go abroad or just "speak and speak".

But I would warn against relying on teachers too much in the attempts to defossilize mistakes. Teachers were the reason behind some of my persisting mistakes. So, I think it should be stressed everywhere that any student aspiring to get to a high level should primarily constantly evaluate their teacher, if they've got one, and check anything suspicious in other sources.

The last part should be quoted everywhere. Staying within the comfort zone is a huge problem. The international "Broken English" standard is a very clear proof. It is not easy to get through this. Especially as the common trends all around are more about "using just a few hundred words really well" and similar nonsense, and most resources being focused on the first 1000 words or at most the first 5000 words. As I've been saying for years: Extensive vocabulary knowledge is hyperimportant.

The discourse structure of some languages (those that repeat a phrase in confirming, questioning, or expanding on an utterance) allows for natural error correction if a learner is listening well. However, many languages, English being one of them, are not so structured. The problem with Level 3 proficiency is that it is good enough, and good enough means that few people will take the time to correct or explain errors in the learner’s speech or writing. This may explain why many Level 3 speakers proclaim that they are often mistaken for natives — obviously, they are not. It is just that their errors have not been brought to their attention. This dearth of correction, however, is a Leaver 8 bump, a big one, because it keeps students comfortably, happily, and even proudly, functioning at the lower 3-level proficiency.

Yes, yes, and yes. But what is never being addressed: this is not primarily the mistake of the individual learners or an unfortunate sideeffect of the natives being nice about the mistakes.

Many countries are making their general public get to this point and stay there (for example mine) due to:
1.low level outcomes, when it comes to the educational mainstream. Too easy and too level highschool leaving exams are a good example. They make "B1" (you can pass with much less, if you drill the tests) look like a desirable goal for everyone and something to be proud of after 10 years of classes!
2.the unfortunate ideological choice to promote English at the expense of other languages. That leads to lowering the bar (as we need everyone to pass), and also to lowering the standards on the learners of any other language. One of the clearest aspects of the whole other language teaching marketing: "It is not hard!", they need to battle the ESL PR.
3.As people are falsely convinced they have acquired an awesome level during their school years, they are not motivated enough to continue. And it becomes a vicious circle, as employers have to settle for those ESL speakers, they are the majority. And speaking better than them is often a disadvantage, which leads to even less general motivation to progress beyond the crappy level.


Shifting Learner Strategies and Teaching Practices to Reach Higher Levels of Proficiency
Bert H Schuster
...
In practice, not all learners know how to learn, and not all teachers know how to help their students learn effectively. Students may be handicapped by, among other things, arrested strategic competence; change-resistant interlanguage; failure to control basic phonetic, morphological, and syntactic features; lack of cultural knowledge and sensitivity; lack of a broad vocabulary; and lack of pragmatic awareness and/or pragmatic ability. A major problem with level 2 learners is that they may easily overestimate their language skills and not realize how far they have to go to reach general professional proficiency, the level that the US government has set as the standard for some jobs. A closely related problem is that many teachers appear to have become accustomed to their students’ inadequacies and seem satisfied by their performance when they, for example, can read simple authentic texts, understand the main points of more complex texts by guessing, carry on conversations about everyday topics, and understand native speakers in routine social situations. Instead of letting their students tread water, teachers need to push them, for instance to develop the ability to read a variety of prose without using a dictionary, to understand discussions of ideas and opinions, to converse about abstract topics, and to speak without making errors that interfere with communication. Even teachers who can envision these higher goals may not know how to get students there…

So true! Finally someone recognises that the teachers are a huge part of the problem. They settle for too little and students have little chance to find out or to force them to push them further. They don't know how to work with the advanced students and they are also making their jobs easier by the described attitude.
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Re: Reaching High Levels

Postby Cavesa » Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:15 pm


Learning Styles and Learner Strategies Diagnostic assessment (DA), designed to help learners improve proficiency in all four skills, is helpful at all levels but indispensable at high levels (Cohen, 2003). Because it is important to know as much as possible about how individual learners learn, the DA process includes an assessment of students’ learning styles and learning strategies…

Which is one of the reasons why the group classes are so bad. It is impossible to do this, when you have 14 people in the group.

Ehrman (2002) distinguishes five varieties of fossilization: (1) functional, (2) instruction-fostered, (3) domain restriction, (4) affective, and (5) arrested strategic development. In addition, she mentions a kind of cognitive fossilization that stems from strongly held learner beliefs about their preferred method of language instruction...

This is great, I'll try to look up this paper! The five types look probable, hopefully the author proposes some solutions too.
I am rather curious about the cognitive fossilisation. It is definitely possible for some people. But it is surely much less of a problem than those teachers with strongly held believes about the student's needs. I could talk a lot about those. :-D
.........

It is great to see these issues are being researched and some of the resulting opinions could be useful, if they reach the language teaching mainstream. Especially as they identify some of the problems the teachers have, not the students.
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Re: Reaching High Levels

Postby rdearman » Sun Jun 17, 2018 3:21 pm

The paper linked to in the original post is much longer. 89 pages and expands a lot on some of the issues raised.
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Re: Reaching High Levels

Postby reineke » Sun Jun 17, 2018 5:15 pm

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Last edited by reineke on Fri Dec 27, 2019 3:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Reaching High Levels

Postby reineke » Sun Jun 17, 2018 6:32 pm

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Re: Reaching High Levels

Postby Cavesa » Sun Jun 17, 2018 8:01 pm

Reineke, you are fuelling my procrastination too much! :-D

(but thanks for the interesting material)
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Re: Reaching High Levels

Postby Teango » Sun Jun 17, 2018 8:47 pm

Thanks, Reineke! Here's to challenging assumptions and feathering our boudoirs with promiscuous reading!! 8-)
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