A Ceiling Effect in Traditional Classroom Foreign Language Instruction: Data from Russian

This article compares previous language gain studies in foreign languages with new data on language gain in the instructed second language acquisition of Russian. The acquisition of listening, reading, speaking, and writing proficiency shows a significant correlation not only with hours of classroom instruction in immersion and nonimmersion settings, but also with grammatical competence. The data suggest that there is a ceiling effect in traditional classroom foreign language instruction.