A norm standard was specified in order to determine the degree of proficiency that most German EFL students should reach.
Bilingualism provides a unique opportunity for understanding the relative roles of proficiency and order of acquisition in determining how the brain represents language.
For example, Gollan et al. (2011) speculated that bilingual processing delays have a larger impact on production than comprehension because production requires more exposures, or more lifetime practice, in order to reach high levels of proficiency.
Finally, an attitude toward MSCAT questionnaire can be administered among the participants in order to see how they felt about their MSCAT experiences and to possibly find out their feedback (suggestions, weaknesses, etc).. So, first, the examinees can be given a paper-and-pencil test of English proficiency in order to control for the effect of proficiency affecting DIF.
The expert groups met for a final time after the Main Study to review the results in order to create or refine descriptions of proficiency along each of the scales.
The basic principle of the Dreyfus model is that the student progresses through five stages of proficiency in this specific order: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and expert.
However, it was unclear from that study whether proficiency or order of acquisition determined the extent of bilateral activity in English, and whether such activity is specific to the rather unnatural act of reading [31].
In the present study, we sought to examine whether these effects relate to language proficiency or order of language acquisition by testing Spanish-English bilingual subjects who had become dominant in their second language.
Although right posterior fusiform did not show the same repetition modulation in the English-dominant group (perhaps due to an interaction between proficiency and order of acquisition for reading), the trending Spanish>English effect in that region suggests a similar function.
Therefore, it is the lack of proficiency rather than secondary acquisition order that determines the recruitment of non-classical areas for word processing.
