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Is comprehension measurable? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5200 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 97 of 211 18 August 2014 at 2:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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Understanding is simply something that cannot be measured by numbers any more than wants/desire/love/sickness/health/smarts, etc. These sorts of things can be measured on an ordinal scale.
Wikipedia's Levels of Measurement. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5255 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 98 of 211 18 August 2014 at 2:55am | IP Logged | |||||
The main argument for using these percentage estimates of comprehension seems to be that they are useful for personal benchmarking and to track individual progress. I have no objection to this, as I have pointed out many times. But a statement such as "I understood 75% of Harry Potter 1" is not the same as "I estimate that I understood around 75% of Harry Potter 1" or "I understood the gist or some of Harry Potter 1." These statements are somewhat similar but what I see here is the very definitive "I understood 75% of Harry Potter 1". Everybody seems to be saying to me that the speaker didn't really mean 75%; it's just a number to which another figure will be compared. The important thing is the progression from 75% to 85%. But why 75% and not 65% or 80%? How did this person arrive at 75%, even if only for personal benchmarking? This is what I find so mysterious. What kind of calculating or estimating did this person do? I understand of course that as the person is reading Harry Potter 1 they are doing some kind of math and saying "Well I seem to be understanding three quarters of the words on every page so I must be at 75% comprehension." And how about 85% comprehension? The reasoning seems to be, "I understand more than the 75% of last time and I still don't think I understand everything, so it must be 85%." All of this is pure speculation. The person did not really calculate this 75% of Harry Potter 1. At the most, this person imagines they understand 75% of this text. In fact, the person has picked a number out of thin air because it looks good and without any serious calculation. It could just as well have been 70%, but 70% doesn't look as good as 75%. Edited by s_allard on 18 August 2014 at 4:40am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4079 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 99 of 211 18 August 2014 at 4:11am | IP Logged | |||||
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"I was watching TV", "I was watching TV in my home", and "I was watching TV with my eyes, sitting in my home" all technically express different things, but functionally a person would probably extract the same information from each, the last two would only be helpful under unusual circumstances or in the event of misunderstanding.
Using numbers and percentages is just a way of communicating more specifically, but it doesn't require the speaker to base it on anything concrete or commit them to any claims to truth. Its possible to speak in concrete terms, but then you're discussing some measurement that you think will correlate to their understanding, rather than discussing their perceived understanding which is what they were trying to express before. All those questions sound great to ask a person in their log, but I don't know how to discuss them removed from context without diving into a philosophical discussion of what are we actually doing when we use language and math. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5255 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 100 of 211 18 August 2014 at 6:47am | IP Logged | |||||
This says it all: "Using numbers and percentages is just a way of communicating more specifically, but it doesn't require the speaker to base it on anything concrete or commit them to any claims to truth. " In fact, I've been saying the same thing all along. Using numbers and percentages gives an aura of precision and accuracy (communicating more specifically) but is not based on any concrete evidence and has no scientific foundation (commit them to any claims of truth). I couldn't have said it any better myself, 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4079 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 101 of 211 18 August 2014 at 1:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I guess where I differ, is that it never comes across to me as having an "aura of precision", I think it is a useful way to help visualize their sense of comprehension. I would never assume they were using some kind of external measure, unless they specified that they were doing so.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6528 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 102 of 211 18 August 2014 at 2:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I make statistics of all kinds about my language learning, but measuring understanding in exact numbers is not something I would even try to do.
Take the simple claim "I understand 75% of Harry Potter in language X". What does that mean? When I left Irish for a time I certainly understood 75% of the words, but I still needed my dictionary and my English edition to combine those words into 75% of the kind of meaning I would have got from a Danish or English edition. How much does 'getting the gist' represent out of 100%? I would say 5% at most (if pressed for a number), but maybe those 5% are enough for my purposes. The 'gist' is so far even from a modestly decent understanding of a passage in a book that it doesn't really make sense to define it as a percentage of the supreme understanding of a native speaker who happens to be an avid Potter-fan with a degree in literary analysis. If we can't even define where the 100% should be pinpointed, why then bother with percentages for less complete understanding? It is simpler to deal with single or compound words, where I routinely mark words as known, unknown and something in between and use these verdicts as the basis for my statistics. But that only functions because I stipulate that knowing the core meaning is enough to classify a word as known. But do I really know all shades of its meaning or all its idiomatic uses? Almost certainly not. So the problems already start here, and the further we go in the direction of whole books the less you can quantify your understanding. Edited by Iversen on 18 August 2014 at 6:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4834 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 103 of 211 18 August 2014 at 6:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
Nope, not because it looks good. It is picked because it feels right and that is a hell of a difference. The 100% doesn't need to be defined the same way for everyone. My 100% is my reading comprehension in Czech. But there may be people with different 100%, including knowing 100% words. And it is their scale so they are free to set it just as they like. Why is it a progress from 75% to 85% and not from 80 to 85 of from 53 to 61? Because it feels right. Because we are used to thinking in halves, quarters, fifths so much that we use the smaller values like 4% only once in a while. And because many of us need to express how much we feel we have progressed, because we need to imagine a representation of our progress in order to set and accomplish shorter term goals. Because saying "I progressed a little" or "I progressed a little more" or "I understand quite a lot" is not such a representation. It means nothing. We do not imagine anything when saying this. It is even less comparable than the %s. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5255 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 104 of 211 19 August 2014 at 4:42am | IP Logged | |||||
I won't repeat myself. All my arguments have already been made. This post adds to what I have said. The fans of percentages have no logical or scientific basis for these numbers other than they "feel" right. As I have said umpteen times, there is no real attempt to measure comprehension. It's all feel, hunches and haphazard guessing. 100% doesn't mean 100%; it can mean anything whatever people want it to mean. In other words, it all means nothing. It just look good. When asked what does "I understood 75% of Harry Potter 1" mean, the only answer is: "It means that I felt that I understood 75% of Harry Potter 1". It's all a matter of feeling. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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