To Advanced Proficiency and Beyond

Theory and Methods for Developing Superior Second Language Ability

Tony Brown, Jennifer Bown, Tony Brown, Jennifer Bown

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781626161740
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Didattica nell'ambito linguistico e artistico

To Advanced Proficiency and Beyond: Theory and Methods for Developing Superior Second Language Ability addresses an important issue in Second Language Acquisition—how to help learners progress from Intermediate and Advanced proficiency to Superior and beyond. Due to the pressures of globalization, American society encounters an ever-increasing demand for speakers with advanced language abilities. This volume makes available cutting edge research on working memory and cognition and empirical studies of effective teaching. In addition it can serve as a practical handbook for seasoned and pre-professional instructors alike. The bringing together of the latest in second language acquisition theory, decades of empirical research, and practical classroom application makes for an unprecedented volume examining the achievement of Superior-level foreign language proficiency.

Part One

Defining Characteristics of High-Level Language Learning and Learners

Chapter 1

Experience with Higher Levels of Proficiency

BETTY LOU LEAVER AND CHRISTINE CAMPBELL

SINCE 1983, US GOVERNMENT institutions have set about producing language learners at Interagency Language Roundtable scale Level 3 (ILR-3¹) and higher in several languages, the most common of which has been Russian. Pilot programs, as well as some enduring programs, have been undertaken at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA), and the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC). Gradually, the understanding that levels as high as ILR-4/4+ can be achieved in a classroom setting, sometimes even without an in-country immersion experience, has increased as one program after another has actually accomplished this goal.

Literature Review and Historical Background

In 2002, Byrnes referred to the “disjuncture” in American postsecondary language programs between the teachers’ interest in helping students attain higher levels of proficiency and the realities of the learning environment where students were exposed to a few semesters of language acquisition courses followed by content courses that rarely stated acquisition goals or included “instructional interventions” designed to help them reach the higher levels (henceforth referred to as advanced second language [AL2] and understood to mean levels 2+ and above; 34). The following year, Byrnes and Maxim (2003, xv) edited a tome focused on the AL2: Advanced Foreign Language Learning: A Challenge to College Programs, which they saw as a vehicle for expanding the “nascent discussion” on the topic in the profession.

The profession has evolved considerably in the past decade, in part due to the gradual dissemination and adoption of the National Standards (1996) in academe and a deliberate—and successful—movement within some organizations to “push the envelope.” Standards within the US government, known today as the ILR scale, were initially developed by FSI in 1954–1955. They were refined at intervals: in 1968, in 1986, and together with other ILR members as part of a Center for the Advancement of Language Learning (CALL)² initiative, in 1996 to standardize variations on the application of the ILR scale that had begun to appear in the intervening years at various government institutions. As the 1996 collaboration indicates, the remainder of the US government language schools and agencies had adopted the ILR scale over time, and, beginning in 1976, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) joined the group accepting the ILR scale as the basis for its own standards, which have also been refined over time. The initial efforts to create national standards for academe were a collaborative effort between FSI and the American Council on Teaching Foreign Languages (ACTFL) in the mid-1980s, which has since come to be known as the ACTFL scale.³ The standards, whether those of the US government or those of ACTFL, continue to be a critical common metric that facilitates communication across diverse language institutions and organizations about goals and objectives.

As a result of improved teaching through the application of the standards and the integration of pedagogically sound technology, high school students are arriving at postsecondary institutions, whether in academe or at government centers like DLIFLC with a higher level of proficiency than in prestandard times, ready to achieve the required base level of proficiency of ILR-2 for basic course students, ILR-2+ for intermediate students, and ILR-3 for advanced students. Most recently, agencies to which graduates of the various DLIFLC programs are assigned have designated ILR-3 as the minimal acceptable level for a career as a government linguist. To meet the learning needs of these students, which generally exceed both practice and experience of most teachers and program managers, teachers in the “post-method era”⁴ have been challenged to adapt their own “theories of practice,” using macrostrategies such as those below when planning lessons and developing curricula for the base levels of proficiency:

• maximize learning opportunities;

• minimize perceptual mismatches;

• facilitate negotiated interaction;

• promote learner autonomy;

• foster language awareness;

• activate intuitive heuristics;

• contextualize linguistic input;

• integrate language skills;

• ensure social relevance; and

• raise cultural consciousness (Kumaravadivelu 2003, 1, 2, 39, and 40).

The National Standards focused primarily on K–16 needs, which required addressing levels below ILR-3, and did not look toward developing refined differentiation among the levels at and beyond ILR-3, which were generally conflated as “Superior.” The push for a refined definition of the upper levels as well as experimentation in teaching at these levels, known informally as “The Level 4 Movement,” was born in 2002 with the founding of two important organizations: (1) the Coalition of Distinguished Language Centers (CDLC), a grassroots organization established to support programs seeking to produce ILR-4 outcomes, and (2) a precursor of the Flagship programs, the Center for the Advancement of Distinguished Language Proficiency at San Diego State University, funded by the National Security Education Program (NSEP). The program was established to train teachers of high-proficiency programs in pragmatic techniques for achieving near-native levels of foreign language skills. With the appearance of these two organizations, publications and conferences of the CDLC, and a growing, yet still nascent body of research, interest and interaction began to coalesce among a number of centers and programs interested in the highest levels of proficiency: some foreign universities, NSEP-funded Flagship programs that began appearing in the United States circa 2004, a few private organizations, and US government agencies. This coalescence formed the core of the Level 4 Movement.

The tenets promulgated by the CDLC and its member institutions were shared in an early volume on teaching to and beyond ILR-3 (Leaver and Shekhtman 2002), focusing on programs and institutions that routinely produced ILR-3, ILR-3+, and ILR-4 speakers, readers, listeners, and writers. These programs included FSI, where the “Beyond Three” Russian and French programs have produced diplomats with Level 3+ and Level 4 skills for twenty-five years—programs and outcomes that appear in few published forums; the American University of Cairo, where foreign students were able to achieve Level 4+ in reading in a one-semester program; NASA, where astronauts from the United States gained Russian-language skills and cosmonauts from a number of countries, including the Soviet Union/Russia, gained English-language skills at professional levels beyond ILR-3 as needed for joint space activities; the Monterey Institute of International Studies, where “bridge” activities were used to prepare students to participate in professional dialogues and do high-level translation and interpretation; Georgetown University, where an immersion was conducted, focused on developing Advanced-level proficiency; Chinese programs that conducted training in-country; an online reading to Level 4 program (LangNet, founded by the National Foreign Language Center [NFLC]) now part of the online Joint Language University; Bryn Mawr College, where teacher training mixed native speakers of English with native speakers of Russian and expected the same outcomes from professional training programs; and, for students of English, the teaching of high-level English-writing skills at the University of Aarhus (Denmark). As with most high-level programs, heritage learners were often among the student body in the programs represented in this volume (and at CDLC annual meetings), and both integration and attention to the specific needs of heritage students as they differ from nonnative learners were required.

The practices used by these programs shared many common features, yet were not based on research. In fact, to this date, few research projects have been undertaken in order to develop a “theory of practice” for achieving the higher levels of proficiency that is rooted in science and used to enhance the probability of success. Among these few was an effort funded in 2001–2002 by NFLC and collaboratively conducted with DLIFLC, in which Leaver and Atwell (2002, 260–278) conducted in-depth interviews with more than one hundred language users who had been tested at ILR-4. Participants came from all walks of life but shared many motivational, demographic, and learning strategy traits, including an intense desire to share their “story.” Data were collected in more than one hundred categories per skill (reading, writing, listening, speaking) and in more than twenty-eight demographic areas. Among the learners were polyglots who shed much light on the variability in language acquisition at higher levels.

The NFLC-DLIFLC study was followed by another and conducted on learners of English at the University of Jordan who had achieved Level 4. That study, funded by the National Teachers of English’s Conference on College Composition and Communication, compared Level 4 achievers with Level 3 achievers and looked mainly at demographics (Jasser, Al-Khanji, and Leaver 2005).

These studies distilled eight typical core characteristics of a language learner able to achieve near-native levels of foreign language proficiency, some of which are counter to those exhibited by good language learners at lower levels of proficiency:

• tenacity;

• a good ear;

• desire to do a good job (a job that requires L2), i.e., instrumental motivation;

• upbringing in a multilingual neighborhood;

• background in a multilingual home;

• experience abroad, particularly in going to school with native speakers and being treated as a native speaker or in holding a job abroad in the same capacity as a native speaker;

• a native-speaking spouse or significant other (or equivalent friendships); and

• access to classroom instruction at levels 2+ and 3 (Leaver 2013).

It is important to note that 75 percent of the students had received upper-level instruction in a classroom setting and considered this instruction at ILR-3 and ILR-4 as “essential.” Unlike the results found by Gardner and Lambert (1972), in which the best students at lower levels of proficiency in university classrooms exhibited integrative motivation, i.e., the desire to acculturate—especially to the point of being mistaken for a native—the surveyed learners who had achieved near-native proficiency displayed instrumental and intrinsic motivation. They did not show integrative motivation. In some cases, passing for a native speaker would have been impossible, especially for a six-foot-seven, blue-eyed, blond-haired student of Chinese. In the case of students working for the government in the national security field, the lack of interest in acculturating was rooted in the job requirement that they not acculturate. Students understood the value of language as a means of communication, or more typically, as a job tool, and a number of them already spoke another language. A few were polyglots, speaking at least three languages.

Shared characteristics that were anticipated included a “sharper” cognitive style, i.e., the tendency to focus on differences rather than similarities, which allowed learners to pick up on refined differences between their native language and target language without being directly taught those differences, which was helpful in the upper-level task of tailoring learners’ languages to the audience. Moreover, in the classroom they were quick to focus on small differences between synonyms and between synonymous expressions. They noticed them, asked about them, and remembered them. Most respondents reported actively seeking out access to the culture; e.g., they went to public places like restaurants and cultural events where the language was spoken. The study abroad programs they joined provided an experience in which the students could attend class alongside native speakers, not foreigners. They became tenacious and were able to motivate themselves when they fell into a slump.

Surprisingly, aside from the typical need for an instructor’s insights into the less obvious aspects of sociolinguistics, there was no clear path to the top. Students made it in their own way, on their own schedule, and meeting their own interests. Even more surprising, among the polyglots, each foreign language was acquired in a different way (Leaver 2003). In some cases, the difference was due to the nature of the language (e.g., Arabic requires a cognitive style open to metaphoric/analogue processing, given the high context nature of Arabic expression, making Arabic easier for these kinds of learners and more difficult for literal/digital learners, who had to acquire metaphoric processing strategies; likewise, a random cognitive style often helps learners of Russian and creates difficulties for a sequential learner, given that Russian word order is not fixed). In other cases, a background with a related language made a difference. In other cases, the difference was due to the opportunities that were available to the learner, e.g., the timing of (or even access to) study abroad. These variables can best be addressed by teachers who are intuitive, diagnostically oriented, and highly flexible.

With upper levels of proficiency, particularly for those striving to reach ILR-4/4+, direct teaching (explanations, parsing of language structures, etc.) has been found to be highly important. Exposure and practice alone generally will not push students to these levels (there are always exceptions) because once they are past ILR-3, they cannot learn simply by observation; they do not know what it is that they are seeing (or, especially, not seeing) among the implicit cultural (pragmatic and sociolinguistic) norms. The sections below will explore what curricula, assessments, and faculty development allow teachers to optimize the conditions for learning that can enhance the probability of learner success, making accessible the unseen aspects of language and culture.

A Starting Point: The Foreign Service Institute

In 1984, the Russian program at FSI embarked on an ambitious project: Take students from ILR-3 to ILR-4 in six months. Entry requirements were a recent ILR-3 rating and at least three years abroad, the typical assignment for a Foreign Service Officer. For six years, 1983–1989, every student in the course made ILR-4 and some reached ILR-4+. The two instructors who developed the content-based course (and others who taught it) used a variety of linguistic activities, such as islands, embellishments, complication exercises, and restating an utterance or speech by someone in a different register. Sociolinguistics, pragmatics, register, and genre were a staple of the program. Students were paired with immigrants in need of help; in helping them with their legal, cultural, educational, daily living, and other needs, students acquired higher levels of language ability. The course culminated in a conference conducted in the Russian language, and was open to the Russian-speaking community in the Washington area. Students presented speeches, conducted debates, and held roundtable discussions on typical State Department topics in Russian, with the public asking unanticipated questions that students had to handle in an erudite manner. This conference was open to students in the basic course, as well, and often pushed students over the ILR-2+/3 threshold.

Today, the program has taken a new turn. Called the Beyond Three Course, there is no guarantee that students will reach ILR-4, although many do, and much more responsibility for learning is left to individual students, with emphasis on strong reading of classics in the language. Different approaches with similar goals have seen nearly thirty years of success in teaching upper levels of proficiency at FSI.

Along the Way: Other Programs

There are other programs that have pushed an occasional student to ILR-4. These include astronaut training, study abroad sites, teacher training programs, some Flagship progra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Past Context, Present Focus, Future Directions: Shifting Focus from Intermediate Skills in Classroom Training to Advanced/Superior and Beyond
• Part One Defining Characteristics of High-Level Language Learning and Learners
• Part Two Approaches to Maximizing Language Gain at Home and Abroad
• Part Three Future Directions in Assessment, Program Design, and National Policy
• Conclusion: To Advanced Proficiency and Beyond: Charting a New Course in the Twenty-First Century
• Contributors
• Index