Further, while he interfaced with clients in Chinese on a daily basis, he found that native proficiency in English often proved to be his greatest asset, enabling him to take the lead in projects involving South East Asia or Asian clients looking to buy U.S. assets.
Although the use of more than one language in a culture has often been seen as socially divisive, early bilingualism in the form of native or near native proficiency in two languages as shown in our study may serve to mitigate such conflicts in contributing to an awareness of what it means to communicate effectively with speakers of different languages.
We do not find any evidence supporting the hypothesis that native language proficiency helps immigrant students from Latin America to catch up faster.
In addition to being in the same time zone, software testers at the UDC also bring the competitive advantage of native English proficiency and greater cultural proximity to their clients than the overseas competition.
However, since private speech is extremely situated, they specified that this issue did not suggest that the learner with native-like proficiency would be self-regulated all the time and not require generating any private speech.
However, formulaic sequences are seldom taught in any principled manner in language classrooms (AlAli & Schmitt, 2012) and despite their prevalence and importance in everyday life, they are often the last hurdle that advanced language learners have to overcome to achieve native-like proficiency (Gouverneur, 2008).
Presently there is a broad consensus that automatic language acquisition more likely yields a native-speaker proficiency when it occurs before a critical age (Lenneberg 1967; Johnson and Newport 1989; Newport 1990; Kuhl 2000; Sakai 2005).
In order to compare effects of language proficiency, native and non-native speakers of the Dutch language, two separate groups were selected.
To this end, travel information was presented to two different groups of participants with respect to language proficiency (natives and non-natives) in three different ways, through popular nomadic systems, a PDA, a mobile phone SMS and a mobile phone plugged in a car audio system, in two kinds of traffic conditions (calm and dense).
For foreign respondents, three groups were created: respondents with high proficiency (Native or Advanced) in both English and Japanese; respondents with high proficiency in Japanese and low proficiency (Basic or None) in English; and respondents with high proficiency in English and low proficiency in Japanese.
For instance, while Ms. Katy has achieved native-level Chinese proficiency through her life-long learning process since her childhood, she mentioned that there were still many things for her to learn, such as the various ways of closing for writing Chinese letters with classical terms.
