Past research has specifically examined attained proficiency in Russian, including studies that are conducted to inform the development of new college textbooks (e.g. Pavlenko, 2006), proficiency test design research aimed at providing the US government Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) with more linguistically appropriate (i.e. lexical, morphological, syntactic or phonological) inventories of areas corresponding to
proficiency-related categories (e.g. Long and Gor, 2008). Of particular interest to the current study, and therefore this review, however, are studies that examine levels of attained proficiency following traditional formal instruction in a college curriculum, special immersion programs conducted in the US, and research designed to examine attained proficiency following study abroad or other in-country immersion programs.
In research designed to evaluate gains in proficiency resulting from a study abroad experience, Brecht, Davidson, and Ginsberg (1993) assessed the proficiency of adult students of Russian both before and after the study abroad in Russia. Participants had between two and three years of Russian in a university program prior to the
experience. Before the study abroad over 57% of the students had achieved a mid- intermediate oral proficiency level, and over 20% of them tested at the high-intermediate level, indicating that over 78% of the participants had achieved an intermediate level of proficiency (according to ACTFL criteria) prior to the study abroad. Following the
semester-long study abroad experience, Brecht et al. found that of the students who began the program at an intermediate level of oral proficiency, only about 40% achieved an advanced level of proficiency by the end of the study abroad. Such rates of achievement can be readily compared with proficiency test scores resulting from both standard formal
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classroom training and special immersion programs that are conducted in the United States.
In a study on the assessment of L2 Russian proficiency related to the four major areas of reading, writing, listening and speaking, Thomson (1996) examined data related to the levels of proficiency that are attainable by L2 learners under standard academic conditions. The study endeavored to answer four major research questions related to proficiency in L2 Russian: a) What level of proficiency is attained in Russian in the four areas after one, two, three, four, and five years of study? b) Does attained proficiency level show significant positive correlations with the amount of study? c) Do proficiency levels in the four areas show any significant positive inter-correlations? d) What are the problems that arise from the establishment of ACTFL proficiency standards for FL study? The results demonstrated that, while the number of low proficiency learners decreases and the number of high proficiency learners increases with length of study (as expected), the range of proficiency was found to overlap between different levels of experience, without any definite correlation between proficiency levels in the four areas and the amount of experience. She also found that inter-correlations between the four areas were not very strong. She concludes that such findings suggest that learners develop along different, unparalleled trajectories and that the use of proficiency
guidelines to set learning outcomes and goals may not reflect developmental realities. It is certainly possible that what appears to be different ‘trajectories’ is merely a reflection of individual differences (IDs) in cognitive and other factors.
In a follow-up study, Thomson (2000) evaluated similar data among students who studied at Middlebury’s Intensive Summer Russian School following varying amounts of
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experience studying Russian under formal instruction in college classrooms. Prior to the Middlebury program, the subjects had studied for anywhere between one and five years. Thomson reported that on average, students attained an advanced level of oral
proficiency after five years of study followed by the immersion experience. Such results have been interpreted to indicate that in spite of course titles that are often used for college classes (i.e. ‘Advanced Russian’), the second and third years of formal instruction actually constitute intermediate levels of language (Pavlenko, 2006).
In a study similar to the research conducted by Thomson (1996, 2000), Rifkin (2005) collected and examined more recent proficiency data for adult learners of Russian. The study attempted to acquire information about three specific areas: a) determine if any significant correlations exist between the number of contact hours in traditional
classroom learning and proficiency in the four main areas of listening, reading, speaking and writing; b) learn whether a major difference in “acquisition” exists between a short- term (9-week) immersion experience and traditional FL classroom learning; c) examine whether there is any correlation between proficiency level in the four skills and
grammatical accuracy. To explore these three areas, Rifkin devised specific proficiency tests that were based on ACTFL Guidelines for the different participants in the study. Participants ranged from being new to Russian study to those who had over five years of experience in various colleges in the US and experiences in Russian-speaking countries. Testing included both pretests (for those with prior experience) and posttests, consisting of both the standard proficiency test format and a grammatical short-answer section (a cloze-type task), and an essay (for upper intermediate-advanced learners) and an oral
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interview. The grammar test was not related to the ACTFL proficiency guidelines, which only examine the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing.
For analysis, a straightforward statistical comparison of achieved level of proficiency in the five areas per number of contact hours in both traditional college classroom programs and the Middlebury immersion program was made. The study reported results that do not differ in any significant way from the results of studies
conducted by Brecht et al. (1993) or Thomson (1996, 2000). The key results of this study seem to indicate that the number of contact hours provided in traditional college classes is inadequate for promoting an advanced level of proficiency, unless such learners also experience an immersion program such as that offered by Middlebury College in Vermont.
Rifkin proposes that study in the traditional college environment is “constrained by a ceiling just below the advanced level” (p. 13), and that those students who do not experience an immersion program will have great difficulty acquiring an advanced level of proficiency. Based on reported data from research related to study abroad programs, in which grammatical ability has been seen to correlate with attainment of higher levels of overall proficiency (e.g. Brecht et al., 1993), Rifkin also concludes that in comparison with such a formal type of immersion experience in the United States, immersion in- country prior to formal classroom training may also create a similar type of ‘ceiling effect’ to the attainment of more advanced levels of proficiency, and that this is potentially due to the predominantly naturalistic nature of a study abroad experience. Such observations raise intriguing questions about the role of different learning conditions (e.g. formal instruction versus naturalistic learning) in the attainment of
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proficiency and more specifically, the potential role that different learning condition sequencing may play in the development of fossilized forms in the IL grammar, which is a major object of investigation in the current study.
Although the nature of past research related to general adult L2 Russian proficiency is limited to broad ACTFL (or other guideline) descriptions of proficiency rather than an analysis of attainment in terms of specific forms that represent native-like accuracy or concrete measures of fluency, results of Russian proficiency studies, such as Rifkin’s (2005) assertion that naturalistic experiences may have a limiting effect on grammatical accuracy, provide the impetus for a close examination of the relationships between learning conditions and the nature of attainment of L2 proficiency in Russian.