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Can adult learners achieve native levels? | ||
Tags: Native Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 41 of 303 02 October 2012 at 4:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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While we are on this topic of native-like proficiency, and especially pronunciation, I will bring up again that favourite example of mine: MIchel Thomas. As many people know, Michel Thomas was the language teacher of Hollywood stars and could charge something like $30,000 for a week of private instruction with his famous secret method.
Many people here swear by his self-teaching methods. I don't have a particular opinion about his methods, but I've always been struck by his strong Polish accent in all his courses. I find it amusing that people are learning to speak from someone who does not come close to sounding like a native. And I have to say that the same goes for many of those many methods where we hear glowing testimonials about the products but rarely in the target language. As a matter of fact, I would be curious to know how many people even complete any of these self-learning methods. All of this to say that this question of native-like proficiency is way over-blown. It all boils down to this: Can an adult learner achieve native-like proficiency? Yes. What is the likelihood of achieving native-like proficiency? Very remote. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 42 of 303 02 October 2012 at 5:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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-What is the likelihood of getting one (major) skill to a native-like level? Not so remote.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 43 of 303 02 October 2012 at 6:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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While we are musing about the statistics about attaining native-level proficiency, I wonder about the results for the CEFR examinations. How many people obtain the various levels of proficiency? Let's take the highest level, the C2, which is still not considered native-level. I wonder how many people pass those tests every year. There must be some data for that.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 44 of 303 02 October 2012 at 8:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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One aspect of this question of native-level proficiency is of course how to define it and how to recognize it. The rule of thumb is to be able to pass for native. This is why pronunciation is so important. The minute you sound native, everyone assumes you are native until you give yourself away with some basic mistakes. And even then most people will assume that you are uneducated or come from some backward region. So, if you want to pass for native, you have to concentrate totally on pronunciation.
In passing, I think that the two most important ways to develop good pronunciation, in addition to living in the country of course, are getting married to a native and going to school in the language. But what about the other aspects like grammar and vocabulary. Well, obviously the more you know the better it is. But, in my opinion the element that defines native-like mastery of grammar and vocabulary is mastery of collocations and idioms. This is where you get into beyond the C2 levels of expression. I don't have time to get into collocations, so I'll concentrate on idioms. Idioms are usually based on images or metaphors. So, there are always two levels of meaning, the literal meaning and the figurative meaning. So, if the wheels fall off a politician's bandwagon, this will be interpreted to mean that things are not going well. Similarly when the government drops the ball on an issue, we know that something was poorly handled. All languages use idioms. English is notorious for their use, but I don't think English uses more than other languages. Idioms are often the base of puns and plays on words. One characteristic of native-like proficiency is the ability to tell jokes in the language. When you think know how jokes work, you realize that it takes an excellent command of the spoken language to be able to make people laugh. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| petteri Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4933 days ago 117 posts - 208 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: German, Spanish | Message 45 of 303 02 October 2012 at 9:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Can Cambridge English Proficiency Exam be considered as a benchmark of C2 skills? Sample papers and sample listening material seem pretty simple. http://www.cambridgeesol.org/exams/cpe/index.html Edited by petteri on 02 October 2012 at 9:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| petteri Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4933 days ago 117 posts - 208 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: German, Spanish | Message 46 of 303 02 October 2012 at 9:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Good point. I am not a brilliant author in Finnish. So the quality of my native writings does not heavily exceed my English capacity. Pity for me. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5057 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 47 of 303 02 October 2012 at 11:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
There is a simple answer. When we learn a foreign language, we try to use it the way native speakers do in all the spheres: pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 48 of 303 02 October 2012 at 12:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
For me it all boils down to two or three observations. The first and most obvious is that our skills don't develop in parallel. The passive skills will generally be superior to the active ones - with the exceptions mentioned in the thread about people who claim they speak better than they understand speech in their chosen langaguages. Besides you will generally be better in either the spoken language or the written language. So even though we normally try to get as close as possible to the standard of native speakers the simple truth is that we mostly fail, either completely in all fields or in all but one or two. So in this perspective the most relevant discussion is not what it will say to attain a native level (or how to get there), but rather how we can administer our time and effort as efficiently as possible at lower levels which in principle can go on forever. For me the interesting treshold isn't the one that defines true nativelike excellency, but rather the one that defines when I can use a language in practice in different ways. And 'use' in this context includes relaxing with a good book or listening to a good TV program or surviving a complicated discussion with natives. It would be nice to be at their level, and this still defines the direction I hope my languages will go, but basically the battle has been won when I can do the things I mentioned. The rest is just a mopping up operation. Edited by Iversen on 02 October 2012 at 12:33pm 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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