Stages of Language Development



While it is important to note that adult ESL students come with different cultural and educational experiences that can affect their language development, researchers beginning with Stephen Krashen and Tracy Terrell (1983) have identified the following general stages of second language acquisition:

• Pre-production: Also called the “silent period” when the student is taking in the target language, but not speaking it.

• Early Production: The student begins to try speaking using short phrases, but the focus is still on listening and absorbing the new language. Many errors occur at this stage.

• Speech Emergent: Words and sentences are longer, but the student still relies heavily on context clues and familiar topics. Vocabulary increases and errors decrease, especially in common or repeated interactions.

• Beginning Fluency: In social situations, speech is fairly fluent with minimal errors. New contexts and professional or academic language are challenging, due to gaps in vocabulary.

• Intermediate Fluency: Communicating in the second language is fluent, especially in social situations. In new situations or in professional or academic areas, speech is approaching fluency, but some gaps in vocabulary knowledge still exist. There are very few errors, and the student is able to demonstrate higher-order thinking skills, such as opinion and analysis, in the second language.

• Advanced Fluency: Student communicates fluently in all contexts and can maneuver successfully in new circumstances and when exposed to new professional or academic information. The student may still have an accent and use idiomatic expressions incorrectly at times, but is essentially fluent and comfortable communicating in the second language. 

Not all students' experiences fall neatly into these categories, and prior educational experiences and literacy in their primary language can have a great impact on the language acquisition process. Most researchers believe that it takes from five to seven years to reach advanced fluency, if a student has strong first language and literacy skills and that it can take between seven to ten years for students with less language proficiency in their first language (Robertson and Ford 2008). Knowing a student’s proficiency level will enable a tutor to differentiate their instruction and address the language needs of their student more directly. This info graphic represents the needs of each stage of language development. 

Researchers have also found that students generally progress much more quickly from beginning to intermediate level (commonly two to three years) than from intermediate to advanced (often four or more years). This is likely because the lower levels of proficiency require simpler vocabulary and sentence patterns and involve language situations that are highly contextualized (familiar, recurrent, and supported by non-linguistic clues, such as gestures and intonation). 

Full proficiency, on the other hand, means students must have command of more complex sentence structures and vocabulary. They must have the professional or academic language to function well in less contextualized situations (for example, a workplace discussion or an academic essay) where they must clearly communicate their ideas on a higher level with more abstract concepts.

For examples and suggestions of appropriate instructional strategies for these stages of language acquisition, explore this resource.

Registration for Literacy DuPage’s “Reading Between the Vines” after-hours social on Thursday, May 18th at Arrowhead Golf Club in Wheaton is now open at https://reading-between-the-vines-LDP.eventbrite.com

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