5. Do L2 Learners Attain the Same Level of Language as Native Speakers?
The question of the end-point of L2 acquisition was already implicit in the question about age but has been raised more explicitly in recent years: what is the final state that L2 users can reach in the knowledge of a second lan- guage? Despite the interlanguage assumption that L2 learners have independent grammars, the final state of the L2 learner has frequently been seen in terms of whether L2 learners can achieve the same competence as a native, often called “ultimate attainment.” The starting point was a study by Coppieters (1987) who gave grammatical- ity judgments to near-native and native speakers of French on nine syntactic structures. Though the near-natives hardly deviated from the native speakers on some structures, on others they differed more, for example, tense contrasts. Even these advanced L2 users could therefore still be distinguished from native speakers. Their ultimate attainment differed from that of the native speaker. Birdsong (1992) criticized the Coppieters research on a number of counts and essentially redid the experiment with near-native speakers of French with English as L1 and native speakers. He found that, while it was true that the near- natives differed from the natives as a group, when treated as individuals 15 of the 20 near-natives were within the native speaker range, while in the Coppieters study none were. That is to say, in effect five people should not have formed part of the near-native group. The L2 attainment of these speakers did not differ from that of native speakers. White and Genesee (1996) continued this approach by comparing native speakers of English and L2 learners, divided into near-native and non-native groups, who were given a timed grammaticality judgments test of questions such as Which one are you reading a book about? and Who did you meet Tom after you saw? There were no differences between the natives and near-natives in accuracy and speed, with the exception of sentences such as Which movies do the children want to rent? The conclusion is that “Ultimate attainment in an L2 can indeed be native-like in the UG domain” (White and Genesee 1996: 258).
The balance of the research to date suggests that a small proportion of L2 learners can acquire the same knowledge of a language as native speakers, just as a small group seem able to acquire a native-like accent. But the question remains whether closeness to the native speaker is an appropriate yardstick to measure them by. Birdsong (1993: 717) construes “ultimate attainment in L2A [second language acquisition] in terms of whether non-natives can display evidence of possessing native linguistic norms.” But bilinguals use languages for different purposes than monolinguals and have a total language system of far greater complexity in their minds; why should L2 users be measured against the knowledge of a person with only one language? As Sridhar and Sridhar (1986) point out, “Paradoxical as it may seem, Second Language Acquisition researchers seem to have neglected the fact that the goal of SLA is bilingualism.” Indeed it is evident that L2 users can become more proficient than average L1 users, as we saw with Conrad’s writing. L2 users for instance make fewer spelling mistakes in English than 15-year-old native children (Cook 1997d). Relating L2 ultimate state to native speakers may be convenient but does an injustice to the overwhelming majority of L2 users, who are thereby seen as failures for not achieving something which is, by definition, not an achiev- able target. The unique status of the two languages of the L2 user has been abandoned in favor of seeing whether the L2 is a defective version of the L1.