To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Interchange, now in its fourth edition, we’ve been running a series of blog posts by Interchange author and world-renowned linguist Jack C. Richards. Today’s post completes the first part of that series, as Jack looks at the conclusions we can draw about helping move learners beyond the plateau between intermediate and advanced levels.
From the previous posts, we can identify a number of areas that need to be addressed if learners are to move from the intermediate to an upper-intermediate/ advanced level of language proficiency. They will now need to achieve the following:
- Expand their grammatical competence, including acquiring new ways of using known forms, as well as adding more complex language resources to their linguistic repertoire.
- Become more fluent and accurate language users.
- Develop the capacity to monitor their own language use as well as that of others, and to notice the gap between their productive competence and those of more advanced language users.
- Continue to develop their vocabulary, particularly at the 5,000 to 6,000 word range.
- Develop a greater awareness of and familiarity with patterns of lexical collocation.
- Master the use of conversational routines and other means of participating actively in conversation and other forms of spoken discourse.
- Further develop their proficiency in listening, reading, and writing.
Attaining these goals requires providing learners with a rich source of language learning experiences that allow for the gradual development of language skills across the different modalities of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. These experiences should allow learners to become successful monitors and managers of their own learning, aware of the limitations of their current level of language ability, but also aware of the means by which they can move beyond the intermediate learning plateau to more advanced levels of language use.
Jack will be back in a few weeks with a new series of posts. You can catch up on previous posts in this series here.