“TEACHER, HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO LEARN A LANGUAGE?”

This is a question students often ask me, especially those in university. They want to know this because they are very much aware that getting a good job often depends on their English language skills. Today, it is common in Mexico for job interviews to be conducted in English, and students need to be prepared for this. I always try to avoid telling students what the research says concerning the hours needed to master a language; they would be horrified! In any case, there is no straightforward answer to the question. Some of the variables are the native language and the specific target language (usually English); how many languages the student has already learned and which ones; how much time the student will spend on learning; which learning strategies are used, and what level of proficiency we are talking about. Learning a language usually takes several years. Studies suggest that in the United States school-aged children need 2 to 3 years to develop social language (BICS or conversational skills) and 5 to 7 years to acquire the academic language proficiency (CALP) needed to reach parity with native English speakers (Cummins, 1991; Thomas & Collier, 1997).

In today's world, many people who study a foreign language mainly desire to speak it. It is logical then, that they would want to know how well a person can expect to speak a language after studying it for a certain number of hours, and conversely, how many hours it may take him to reach the fluency he has in mind. The Foreign Service Institute classifies proficiency in a language as follows:

1. Elementary proficiency. The person is able to satisfy routine travel needs and minimum courtesy requirements.

2. Limited working proficiency. The person is able to satisfy routine social demands and limited work requirements.

3. Minimum professional proficiency. The person can speak the language with sufficient structural accuracy and vocabulary to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations on practical, social, and professional topics.

4. Full professional proficiency. The person uses the language fluently and accurately on all levels normally pertinent to professional needs.

5. Native or bilingual proficiency. The person has speaking proficiency equivalent to that of an educated native speaker.

In the United States, the most comprehensive research in the field of second language acquisition was carried out by Wayne Thomas & Virginia Collier. They studied the language acquisition of 700,000 English language learners in a longitudinal study from 1982 to 1996. The students in the study had no background in English and the study’s main aim was to find out how long it would take these students to reach native speaker performance on norm-referenced tests. Thomas and Collier also looked at such variables as socioeconomic status, first language, programs used to learn English, and number of years of primary language schooling.

It is interesting to note that Thomas and Collier found that the most significant variable in how long it takes to learn English is the amount of formal schooling students have received in their first language. For example, for one of the studies they carried out, they researched a group of Hispanic students from an affluent suburban school district who received one to three hours of second language support per day in a good ESL program. Most students exited the program within the first two years but all were at or above grade level in native language literacy. Some of the results of the study were:

So it takes typical bilingually schooled students, who are achieving on grade level in L1, from 4-7 years to make it to the 50th NCE in L2. It takes typical “advantaged” immigrants with 2-
5 years of on-grade-level home country schooling in L1 from 5-7 years to reach the 50th NCE in L2, when schooled all in L2 in the U.S. It takes the typical young immigrant schooled all in L2 in the U.S. 7-10 years or more to reach the 50th NCE, and the majority of these students do not ever make it to the 50th NCE, unless they receive support for L1 academic and cognitive development at home. (Thomas & Collier, 1997).

To make this relevant for those of us who teach English in Mexico, we can look at the study Thomas and Collier did on native-English speakers whose parents chose to have their children placed in a two-way bilingual class. These students include those with advantages comparable to the ones most students at the Tec de Monterrey have; for example, their first language is not threatened in any way. According to Thomas and Collier:

The middle- income children often have parents cheering them on, providing L1 cognitive and academic support at home. How long does it take these “advantaged” English speakers? Four to seven years is the minimum time frame for these students to reach the point where they can show off what they know on the school tests in their second language, at the level of a native speaker of that language. These middle-income students achieve on or above grade level in English (L1) with each year of school, but it still takes until at least fourth or fifth grade for the typical students in this group to make it to the 50th NCE on school tests in L2. Once they get there, they stay there and can demonstrate what they know in either L1 or L2, as long as L2 grade-level academic work continues to be provided. In other researchers’ studies, in the U.S. as well as other countries, similar results have been found around the world when following bilingually schooled students long-term (Collier, 1992; Lindholm, 1990; Lindholm & Aclan, 1991). Typical low-income native-English speakers, including low-income African-American students, also generally reach and stay at the 50th NCE in L1 within 4-7 years of bilingual schooling, and can achieve at the 50th NCE in L2 if schooling is continued in L2.

So if we take the 4 to 7 years as an average, and that is assuming that the learning takes place under favorable circumstances and with a good program, this is not something I want to tell my students. When you are a teenager, that amount of time is unfathomable. When I told one student that it takes a few years, he told me, “but I’ll be old by then!” I think that the best and fastest way for a student to become proficient in a language, i.e. in speech and writing, is to spend some three to six months studying the language in the home country and then to go to the foreign country for at least a year. Needless to say, during that year the student must only speak the foreign language. I think that at the end of this year, the student would understand most people including those on television and in movies, be able to read almost any written material without a dictionary, and be able to write fairly well.

And what about the common belief that very young children learn a language easily? Probably not so. Often the fluency is due to the fact that their foreign-language development took place at an age when they were too young to have cognition of words such as cognition, fluency, and development. An 8-year-old child who goes to live in another country for three years becomes a fluent 11-year-old, not a fluent adult. Truly fluent bilingual people who had childhood years abroad usually turn out to have learned most of the other language as adults. And last, but not least, what about the belief that adult learners never get the accent right. This is true, up to a point, but let’s not forget that all English speakers have some kind of ‘accent.’

Pronunciation is a special challenge, but adult learners are much quicker than children at many other things so this issue is really secondary. In today’s world, there are more non-native English speakers than there are native English speakers. An accent, as long as the speaker is understandable, is of no importance.

References

Lessow-Hurley, Judith. Meeting the Needs of Second Language Learners: An Educator's Guide. ASCD, 2003

Smiley, Patricia, Trudy Salsberry. Effective Schooling for English Language Learners: What Elementary Principals Should Know And Do. Eye On Education, Inc., 2007


Thomas & Collier, 1997. http://www.ncela.gwu.edu/pubs/resource/effectiveness/thomas-collier97.pdf