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Approaching near-native competence

المؤلف:  Muriel Saville-Troike

المصدر:  Introducing Second Language Acquisition

الجزء والصفحة:  C6P188

2025-11-19

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Approaching near-native competence

The judgment that L2 learners have approached or achieved “near-native” or “native-like” competence means that there is little or no perceptible difference between their language performance and that of native speakers. Because one’s L2 system is never exactly the same as the native speaker’s (even if we cannot readily perceive differences), most of us would not consider the final state of L2 development to be completely “native,” although we may allow for some rare exceptions.

The most likely level of linguistic production to retain some identifiably “foreign” feature is pronunciation, especially if L2 learning began after the age of twelve or so. Next most likely is that learners will have to select from a more limited lexical repertoire than do native speakers of the same educational level, will not use words with the same probability of occurrence in the same phrasal units (e.g. collocations), and will not recognize connotations and allusions which require cultural information and experience. Native interpretation of variability is also unlikely ever to be acquired in L2, including the social meaning of variants and appropriate choice for different registers. For example, while the English adjective big may be perfectly “correct” semantically and grammatically, it may sound “odd” in written academic contexts where a native speaker would use large, major, great, considerable, significant, or some other synonym. Among the last grammatical forms to be mastered in English L2 are the choice of complements to follow specific verbs (e.g. the use of for . . . to after like, as in I like for her to sing but not after enjoy, as in *I enjoy for her to sing), article selection (the, a, or nothing) before nouns, and appropriate use of prepositions. The residual nature of these problems cannot be explained in terms of order of exposure or frequency of input, since articles and prepositions are among the first words encountered and have the highest frequency in the language. I cannot find convincing evidence to account for this phenomenon, but I believe that these errors remain persistent in large part because they resist conscious, “logical” treatment. When nonnative uses of articles and prepositions are pointed out to them, advanced English L2 students may ask why one form rather than another is used. The only genuinely valid answer, “Because it is,” appeals to grammaticality judgments that are based on a level of intuition which few L2 learners can be expected to attain. Older L2 students who do approach “near-native” competence almost surely have benefited from extensive and varied input, feedback which includes some correction and focus on grammatical form, and very high levels of motivation. At the same time, we must recognize that many intelligent, hard-working, highly motivated students will not approach this level of competence. It is important for language teachers, in particular, to accept the fact that “native-like” production is neither intended nor desired by many learners whose goals for L2 use do not include identification with native speakers of the language nor membership in its native speech communities. Indeed, adopting this goal may be considered “imperialistic” in many social and political settings (discussed in Chapters 3 and 5), and in any case, is certainly unrealistic for most beginning learners beyond the stage of puberty. To be valid, criteria for assessing relative L2 achievement must take into account the needs, goals, and circumstances of second language learners.