The Road to Fluency

[Nancy Frishberg]

>Wondering if anyone can point me in the direction of research which states
>the length of time required to become fluent in a second language.

wish I could easily cite chapter and verse, but I'll give the anecdotal or
remembered version of several studies and suggest you engage a librarian to
hunt up detailed references:

 - for reading fluently in a new language, we used to cite about 100 pages
of adult-level text (or some similarly round number).  It didn't matter
much what kind of text.  This was the wisdom when I taught as a grad
student in the Language Program at UCSD many years ago.  It's not cheating
to use a dictionary, but the assumption was that after some large number of
pages, you would rarely need to consult it.  Note it says nothing about
production in speech or writing.  And it's hard to know what the equivalent
measure in an unwritten language would be.  (E.g., how many hours of
videotape, with what sorts of dictionary-like supports?)

 - Juergen Meisel at University of Hamburg has been working for many years
on studies of long-time residents of Germany whose German remains
"foreign".  His work would be relevant to understand what factors trigger
fluency or lack thereof, and the features that signal foreignness or
native-like production.  He's focused on oral languages (e.g. Spanish or
Turkish speakers who live in Germany).

My own experience as a sign language learner and teacher and observer says
that three years or so of serious immersion will get you to the point of
being able to laugh in the right places, and to know when to look which way
when you're the 3rd person in a conversation.  Not saying much - you'll
still have a hearing or later-learner accent, probably not full control of
various constructions and morphology, but able to read most fingerspelling.


Nancy Frishberg  +1 650.654.1948  nancyf at fishbird.com