Language acquisition after the plateau

In my last post, I told you about the language acquisition curve during a full immersion experience like the ones organized by Deep French. I ended on the plateau effect participants typically get to, where speaking and understanding French may seem more tedious than in the middle of the experience, but where your proficiency has actually surpassed what it used to be. It’s time I tell you what happens after the plateau.

I must say it was a pleasure for me to witness it in the past weeks: I continued teaching French to two of the participants through online conversations and I was so pleased to observe that their French had improved even further compared to when the immersion experience ended. For both women, language was more fluid and more correct.

This is probably best explained if I use my hiking image again: acquiring a language during a full immersion experience is like going on a challenging hike. At the beginning, it’s hard because you are still warming up. Then you pick up pace and you feel it’s getting easier. Then you plateau: you’re starting to get tired and you need a break. You slow down your pace, but regardless, you are much further along on your hike than you were when you were still in the parking lot. In a 10-day immersion, it is likely you will plateau towards the end, and leaving will be like equivalent to taking a break on that challenging hike. You will pause your language hike by going back to a linguistic environment you are more comfortable with. Embrace that break, let your brain rest and let it organize things silently.

If you’ve ever gone on a challenging hike, you know very well what happened after you took a break, sat down and ate a snack: you got going again, and you most likely did so at the same pace you were at before you plateaued, or at an even better pace. You got stronger, so you were not back at your pre-warm-up level, you were working with a higher, strengthened level. The same is true of a language hike, or in other words, of a Deep French immersion experience.

Now, just like we all hike at different paces, we all acquire skills at different paces. Some of you will plateau in the middle of the experience, take a short break, and pick up even stronger in the last phase of the experience. Others will plateau at the end, and others may not even plateau at all because they would have needed a longer experience before needing a break. In all cases, your acquisition goes up and keeps going up after the experience, even if you’re no longer even following a course of any sort! What matters the most is to welcome the different phases and to know that, after a plateau, there is more progress that organically happens.

Baptiste Delvallé