Well I think you have to evaluate which of the area you have problem with. listening, speaking or writing?. I think non native speakers will always have an disadvantage in some area. For example my wife is a teacher in US but she was raised in Puerto Rico which is a Spanish country. The state required teachers to get and pass a test for the semester. My wife did pretty well in math and English grammar but failed in the reading comprehension section. The reason to that is that there were 30 question that has to be completed in 30 minutes. The time to get the read the whole paragragh and translate it in your native language take more time that the test let you to complete. I'm still working on my speaking reaction time. Sometimes it's hard for me to start talking in English but once I start, I do very well. I have been living in the US for 7 month now and when I first came here, I had a hard time adapting to different type of pronunciation especially pronunciation that came from African americans. I'm working on that everyday.
