It seems generally true to say that second language acquisition is
characterised by a drive towards approximating native speaker behaviour
and accommodation to native speech norms. Many learners with an integrative
motivation (the desire to identify with native speakers of the culture,
as Gardner defines it) want to become like members of the linguistic
community, if we take community to mean a network of relationships.
How to “fit in” to the native speaker community frequently seems to be a
goal for those who go abroad to live for a time in the native speech community.
It seems equally clear that this accommodation involves more
than structural and grammatical knowledge. It is not clear, however, what
makes the speaker sound native. Defining the notion of nativeness or
“sounding like a native” may be connected with sociolinguistic knowledge,
and the perception of the speaker as native-like may be related at
least in part to sociolinguistic competence. This competence involves linguistic
as well as pragmatic and general cultural knowledge. Issues of fluency,
of native speaker norms, dialects, context and style shifting, knowledge
of variation in the target language and use of formulaic phrases may
all be among the aspects which appear to form part of what is perceived
as the improvement after the stay abroad. These are important issues in
the perception of non-natives by natives.