I just had a long talk with Nita from Nepal. She’s taking advanced English and is very unhappy with the teacher. The teacher, she says, is knowledgeable but doesn’t know how to transmit the knowledge so she isn’t learning anything. The class started out with twenty people and now has four or five. But it’s more than her inability to transmit knowledge, it sounds like. Because never once has she asked the students what they want to know. Actually, she asked once and then said, “Well, how can I give you that?” So she’s lacking skill. But she’s also lacking common sense and imagination. It seems that the very first step in teaching an advanced class it to ascertain from the students what they want to learn, and to evaluate their oral and written capabilities. That hasn’t happened in this class, so these advanced English speakers, in whose speech I hear lots to be corrected though they’re very competent, are learning nothing.

Nita was complaining that she’s not perfect in English and that she still makes grammatical mistakes. In fact, her grammar is overall excellent. She doesn’t get the zero article but she is extremely facile. Her speech is a bit stilted and non-nativelike, but fluent. Her accent could use some work. But again, she has an extremely high level of competence, yet is frustrated, I think because she knows she’s not perfect. She’s reached a true stage of fossilization, where she knows she’s not sounding like a native but has no idea how to make that happen. What she doesn’t realize is that that is essentially impossible, for a late-acquirer of an L2 to have native-like fluency. She wants to be perfect and is frustrated that she can’t. Particularly frustrating must be her inability to hear where she’s going wrong. Kim and I told her that there are some sounds she could work on, and some forms that could be more colloquial, but that she’s highly skilled already. Still, that wasn’t good enough for her.

I guess with any plateau, it’s hard because you don’t see the potential for any progress, but only a plain. That’s particularly profound at a high level of fluency because the plain seems infinite. I suggested she try to begin to listen to English again as she did as a beginner, but in fact I don’t think that would do any good. I don’t think she is any longer capable of noticing without guidance.

It’s interesting for me because I am a low-level learner of various languages, and though I find it exceedingly difficult and demoralizing, and there are endless plateaus, I still know what I have to learn. Sometimes I know concretely: there are a million verb forms I need to learn in Spanish, and lots of vocabulary, and accent refinement. A lot of things I don’t even know, like what things require idioms. But I do know a) that I have a lot to learn and b) that it is easy to identify — though a difficult task. Nita’s situation must be strange: feeling like she needs to know more (particularly as a future English teacher) but having no concept of what that might be. She needs a skilled teacher to isolate specialized little bits that needs work and/or she needs to cut herself some slack.

So it’s interesting to note the different nature of frustration for a beginning versus advanced learner.