Compare the learners

Pari is educated in her native language and she is like many typical American grad students in the humanities who try to learn different languages. In addition to Farsi, she has started to learn a new language, Hindi. She is very relaxed and confident during the interview and wants to share whatever she knows with the interviewer. She also monitors her speech most of the time; she corrects her grammatical and lexical errors many times and usually when the interviewer corrects her she does her best to not make that error again. It is believed that most adult learners cannot achieve a native accent after the critical period for language acquisition. Pari’s pronunciation is very good but it is not precisely native-like. She has the ability to pronounce many words correctly including difficult sounds like “خ، ق” [ɣ], [x], but she still has an English accent. This is true even though she has practiced a lot on pronouncing these sounds and being with native speakers to gain this ability.

Like Pari, Fereshteh has had a formal education and is literate in her native language. She is also a very good risk taker and although her Persian proficiency appears to be lower than Pari’s she uses many communication strategies to express herself. She also monitors her utterances and this monitoring causes her to have long pauses. She is thinking about what she consciously knows about the language during these periods and this could be related to her grammar-based background. It’s true that the tasks require her to communicate, but her grammar training hasn’t prepared her to be fluent at that. Fereshteh’s lexicon and syntax are not as developed as Pari’s. She tries her best to answer the interviewer’s questions. Any time she does not understand she uses clarification requests in order to obtain better comprehension of the interview’s question. Overall, Fereshteh seems less confident than Pari.