All chatted out!

I'm feeling rather frazzled. Not only by the ongoing stress of work, or the pace and work requirements of the DELTA, but also by participating in the #eltchat regular thread on Twitter. It's exhilarating and rather exhausting at the same time.
I have to say, however, that it has been an excellent reminder of why I'm still in this job and enjoying it, and it's brilliant to see quite how much enthusiasm, ideas, work and research is going on out there. Being able to bounce ideas off other people to see what happens has been really interesting. This lunchtime, for example, the chat topic was one I proposed - why do so many adult learners never get past intermediate level? Apart from feeling chuffed with myself for having my topic chosen, it was also heartening to see what other people thought on the subject, and helped me formulate an idea which relates back to something I've posted on here before about difficulties students face when moving forward. It's this:
Intermediate students can handle a language. Students at higher levels can manipulate it.
Therein lies the difference. At lower levels, students are taught how to function in English - in other words, they can handle it, even if they handle it clumsily. We could say that they cope with the language. Higher level students, however, manipulate it - in other words, they can alter and change their language to suit their needs, rather than have to handle formulaic systems and phrases. It is this gap between handling and manipulation that many students either cannot, or do not want to, bridge.
I'm going to write about this in more detail later, I think, as it ties in very well with what I've said before about 'fuzzy' understanding as well.But for now, I've got me some reading to do - largely thanks to #eltchat!