Making a Good Choice: Deciding Whether to Attend Summer Language School

Middlebury College Summer Language School and Temple University Professor of Russian Benjamin Rifkin says that students considering studying language in the summer should ask themselves some important questions to clarify their goals and determine what program would be their best choice.
—Article provided courtesy of Middlebury College

Questions to Ask

• What are my goals for studying a language?

• What are my objectives for studying a language this summer?

• What do I know about my learning styles and preferences?

• Do I have any special personal concerns about summer study?

Language Study Goals

Some students choose to study a particular language in order to learn more about their own ethnic heritage. Other students choose to study a particular language in order to read ancient or modern texts. Still other students choose to study a particular language in order to gain fluency to take a job that demands language skills.

Summer Language Objectives

Students with different language learning goals may have different objectives for studying language over the summer.  Some may want to complete a foreign  language requirement, while others want to make rapid progress towards fluency. Some want to immerse themselves in the culture, while others want to read a particular work in the language.

Learning Styles and Preferences

Every student has a unique set of learning styles and preferences. Some students are impulsive, others reflective. Some students are reserved and find it difficult to talk in certain social contexts, while others are extroverted and thrive in those very contexts.  Some students need to see everything they are learning, while others need to heareverything. 

It’s important for you to know your own styles and preferences. For more information about learning styles and preferences, see Achieving Success in Second Language Acquisition by Betty Lou Leaver, Madeline Ehrman, and Boris Shekhtman (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Personal Concerns

Some students have special concerns that they must keep in mind during summer studies, whether it means remaining in close contact with a loved one at home or being able to continue training for a sport or practicing a musical instrument. All of these are an important part of any student’s life.

Answering the Questions

As you consider the questions posed on the previous slide, you should think about your own goals, objectives, styles, preferences, and concerns. What language programs will work best for you given this complex matrix of factors?

Your Expectations

Next you should consider what your expectations of summer language study are?  What do you think you will get out of a summer studying a foreign language?

Language Gain

Many students prioritize “language gain” or “language improvement”as their most important goal for summer language study. Unfortunately, some students have unrealistic expectations for summer language study.

Realistic Expectations

Research on language learning outcomes shows that the most important factor for predicting language learning outcomes is the level of language skills going into the language study program. In other words, your language learning gain will be related to your language goals when you start.

Measuring Language Gain

In the United States, the most widespread scale for measuring language skills is the Proficiency Scale of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL).

The ACTFL Scale:

The ACTFL Scale has four major levels for measuring listening, speaking, reading, and writing. They are defined briefly here in speaking only as an example.

  1. Oral Proficiency

  4. Novice Level
  5. speakers can only speak in memorized phrases. Sometimes they can speak a whole sentence, but it is usually something they have memorized.
  6. They have no functional proficiency in the language.
  1. Intermediate Level
  2. speakers can ask and answer questions and can create with the language to talk in sentence-length discourse about themselves and their
  3. immediate needs in an informal context.  They can get in and out of a predictable situation using their language skills (e.g., ordering a meal in a restaurant from a menu.)


  5. Advanced-level
  6. speakers can speak in paragraphs in all time frames as they  describe and narrate. They can get in and out of situations with complications
  7. (e.g., recovering a lost item).


  9. Superior-level speakers can argue and hypothesize in extended discourse (multiple paragraphs) without any patterned errors in both informal and formal contexts. They can talk their way around specialized vocabulary they don’t know by using more general words they do know.


  10. Jobs that Require Language:
  11. The minimal working competency for using language on the job is the advanced level. Students who attain advanced level proficiency are competitive for entry-level jobs in the federal government and business sector, but there are, of course, many jobs that require even higher level language skills.