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What is good enough? | ||
Tags: CEFR Language Levels | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4680 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 73 of 79 17 January 2013 at 4:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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emk, I was wondering if anyone else was going to beat me to it...
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| petteri Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4924 days ago 117 posts - 208 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: German, Spanish | Message 74 of 79 17 January 2013 at 8:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
What should be the correlation between SAT writing scores and CEFR C2? If we are strict most high school graduates cannot perform the above-mentioned writing tasks in their mother tongue. When I left high school my writing skills were no way appealing, but rather appalling. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 75 of 79 17 January 2013 at 9:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
That's the question, isn't it? If you line CEFRL levels with the Cambridge English band scores, it looks like C1 is enough for a non-native speaker to get into several Ivy League schools. (The Ivy League is an US sports league including Harvard, Yale and a number of other prestigious schools in the eastern US.) Obviously, these schools demand much higher language skills from natives than they do from non-natives, but they still expect the non-natives to take real classes and keep up with the work. So the SAT is designed to ask, "How well does this native student write compared to other native students?" And the advanced CEFRL exams are designed to ask, "Can this non-native student survive university classes, and how much help will they need?" If you think about it, though, there are a lot of US high school students for whom academic English really is a sort of foreign language. They're not familiar with its vocabulary, its collocations, or even its grammar, because they live in a house with maybe six books and they haven't spent enough time reading. Meanwhile one of their classmates lives in a house with 1,000 books and has been systematically working down the shelves of the school library. The latter student is going to be a native speaker of "academic English", and the former will struggle as best they can. And on some level, this is how a native speaker could flunk an advanced CEFRL exam. They might be a native speaker of a particular spoken dialect, but they're not automatically going to be "natives" of the necessary academic registers. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kaptengröt Tetraglot Groupie Sweden Joined 4330 days ago 92 posts - 163 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic Studies: Japanese | Message 76 of 79 17 January 2013 at 9:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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(ignore my random use/lack of use of capitalization in this)
For me it depends less on how much I need to use the language and how much I like the language. Swedish, I live in Sweden but don't care about Swedish, so "good enough" is "am I always understandable (even if bad) and can I always understand everything". i don't see any point in actively working at improving my skills, any improvement will come naturally. i can already read academic papers and understand the news etc. even if i couldn't reproduce it correctly, and in some cases my coursework doesn't even need to be done in swedish (or they wouldn't grade me harshly on my swedish because swedish is not the point of the course), so i am satisfied. icelandic, despite not living there, probably not visiting anytime in the next few years, and not even intending to speak to natives, i still would like to be native-level (although i am perfectly alright with it taking ten or fifteen years just because i am not going to be interacting with anyone from there on a regular basis most likely). japanese, i like it and want to move there some years in the future, so for now i am content doing whatever to slowly improve but once i move i would like to get up to near-native level. i don't think any tests matter. plenty of people pass C2 tests in English and still make tons of mistakes in real-life English, that native speakers would never make, yet use the "i passed the test" justification as to how good their language skills are. as someone pointed out, many people know business English but not everyday English - i would never call someone anywhere close to fluent if they don't "even" know what a pot holder, oven burner, pacifier, or slippers are called, words that kids know, and if they mess up on "everyday use" irregular preposition pairings in phrases/with certain words. and as someone else said, pronunciation is thought of more highly than grammar or vocabulary in many cases, i also wouldn't be able to call them near-fluent if they have perfect grammar yet still pronounce words like "sew" as "sue". (yes, i know it's extremely difficult to learn these words if you don't live in the country with natives at home, but i also know many people think "knowing business and casual (ex. chatting to your online friends) language, without knowing other subjects like household language, is fluent"). edit: my wife adds that "academic or perfect language grammar-wise is often not how actual people speak, i would not call someone really good at a language if they are perfect at academic language, but they can't understand and use normal language. meanwhile a native speaker might or might not be bad at academic language, but they would never be bad at normal language." even if you are going to be a translator for example, it only matters that you can translate things in your field, and if that field is far from dealing with any academic work then there is no need to pass a test that deals with academics. i also don't think "what my countrymen know" is important if you are not an immigrant. however, for someone who is not fluent in the main language(s) of the country to begin with, and on top of that doesn't know anything of the others that native speakers learn in school, it is a bit of a problem (but still only a problem if you don't know any other languages at all other than your own). if everyone is a native of chinese and knows fluent french and then basic German, but you have perfect chinese and know basic japanese but no french, they could pick you for jobs just because you know a "different" language. however if you are native in french, have bad chinese and on top of that don't know any other languages, it will be a problem. Edited by kaptengröt on 18 January 2013 at 9:27am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4551 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 77 of 79 18 January 2013 at 8:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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Failing to understand or to express myself is something I find very frustrating, so 'good enough' for me tends to be either C-range passive skills or the whole package, depending on my contact points with the language.
I'm usually quite apprehensive about speaking foreign languages, so the path of least resistance for me is to focus on reading and listening. If, however, I have a friend who speaks the language in question, or a pressing practical need to speak it on a regular basis, I will keep working at it until I've managed to dispel most of my discomfort. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5422 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 78 of 79 18 January 2013 at 4:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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One of the most interesting, and I dare say revolutionary, aspects of the CEFR system is that there is no reference to linguistic content per se. The total emphasis, and rightly so in my opinion, is what you can do and not so much how you do it. But you do lose points for language mistakes. So the basic strategy is to concentrate on doing certain things well and avoiding areas that you don't master.
In concrete terms, this means that you work around certain complexities of the language and do very well, especially in the spoken test. You could for example largely avoid the French subjunctive and all sorts of complex verb forms where you may be prone to trip up. In fact, you could use the present tense in a lot of areas where you would use the past or the future. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4660 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 79 of 79 18 January 2013 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
There are many mistakes L2 speakers make even in academic register: Let me mention two things I've heard this week: ''chronical infection'' instead of ''chronic infection'' ''system diseases'' instead of ''systemic diseases''. --- I hate writing essays, so I would do poorly on CEFRL tests.* I would prefer translation-based tests, give me a text in my L1 and make me translate it into L2/English. (The translation would need to be double checked, first by a CroatianL1 professor of English, and afterwards, by a native English speaker). (*Just like I do better on interesting mathematics-based IQ tests than on boring psychology-based IQ tests). That being said, I will be taking TOEFL later this year. I need a ''foreign language certificate'' to enter psychotherapy residence. Edited by Medulin on 18 January 2013 at 10:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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