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Article: Students fall short on Vocabulary | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4665 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 209 of 319 23 April 2014 at 9:14am | IP Logged | |||||
Many words are similar but that means it'll be easier to remember them once you encounter them, not that you know them automatically. It's the same with Italian and Spanish: I can watch the news in Spanish and generally get the gist even though I've never studied Spanish. However, if I needed to ask for a newspaper or order a meal in Spanish I'd either resort to hand waving and pointing or hope they spoke (or understood) Italian. I'm sure it'll give me a great head start when I do study it, but it's still not quite as free as you might be suggesting. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4533 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 210 of 319 23 April 2014 at 9:32am | IP Logged | |||||
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Teango: Thanks for the very interesting post.
A simple way of describing Figure 4 is that you have three vocabulary ranges: A-grade students; B-C-D-grade students; and E-grade students. Or in other words, A-grade students who know a lot of vocabulary and grammar, E-grade students who know not much of either, and then lots of students in the middle who all know about the same about of vocabulary, but apparently differing amounts of grammar etc. It's striking how much the upper-range for the vocabulary range of D-grade students overlaps with the lower-range of A-grade students, underscoring how little vocabulary on its own determines the final grade.
I guess one question that should be asked is how students are developing their vocabulary sizes, since vocabulary size is being used here as a proxy for general language ability. To put things to extremes: some students might develop large vocabularies by intensively using the language (reading, speaking, listening etc) others by rote-learning lots of flash cards. In such a situation although the students might have equally impressive vocabulary ranges, the former are (obviously) going to perform far better on tests of language ability. Perhaps developing large vocabularies via flash cards, is a bit like taking vitamins; on paper it seems like they should make you healthier, but in practice you need to eat wholefoods to get the best effects. Edited by patrickwilken on 23 April 2014 at 12:19pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 211 of 319 23 April 2014 at 10:04am | IP Logged | |||||
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This thread has grown and grown, and in the meantime I had forgotten what Milner actually wrote in the text which Gemuse referred to in the first message. So I reread it and found a couple of noteworthy passages - but not the one I was looking for.
The first noteworthy passage is not directly related to the measuring problem, but it is shocking enough to be repeated here : no great progress is visible in the British learners who study in France from the evidence of learners' final year vocabulary size scores. Just possibly learners are making progress in other ways, and the learners themselves suggest that they feel the progress they make on the year abroad disappears quickly on their return. However, equally likely is the possibility that many learners live in an expatriate English speaking community whilst on the year abroad and do not have the amount or quality of input which would be required for significant progress. If those youngsters can't even learn French in France, how can they then be expected to learn it at home? The next quote points in the same direction: What appears to occur is that there is modest vocabulary growth at the outset of learning in school until year 5 when a portion of the learners are able to drop the subject and you get a jump in the mean. Okay, the vocabulary sizes are given as the mean over a population, and removing those pupils who can't say one complete sentence in French makes the mean jump skywards. Could the same thing be relevant above this level? Those with zero skills are removed, but the rest might be divided equally between serious students and mediocre learners who just barely can hang on. In that case it would certainly be relevant to show the distribution curve, and I would be very interested in knowing whether it was bell shaped, schewed or maybe even bipolar ... and in the last case you might consider kicking the bottom half out to make the mean value skyrocket once again. One relevant question here could be: is it possible to make the bulk of an French exam in an English school or university in English, so that weak active skills can be hidden under an avalanche of essays about French topics, but written in English? In that case a low mean might be understandable, but still deeply worrying. Mean values shouldn't be taken at face value. You need to know what you are counting (in this case: word forms, headwords or word families), and you need to decide whether the population you are investigating actually is the relevant one. Another question: in this long thread I have a vague feeling that someone mentioned that the 3000 words or so were counted within a fixed selection of test words. I know from my own word counts that the absolute estimate you get is much less indicative of your total vocabulary than the percentage in a given dictionary. The larger the dictionary, the more words you'll know (until you reach a ceiling where the remaining words are very rare and possibly outdated). So when I have reported my own estimates I have always mentioned the dictionary size too - otherwise the absolute score is quite irrelevant. A final problem is the criterion for 'knowing' a word. If you demand that the test person respond with exactly the same word as somebody has used in the scoring table then you are cheating both your test subjects and those who try to interpret your results. Multiple choice tests will largely eliminate this problem, but only if you somehow compensate for lucky guesses. At any rate: 3300 passive words for a university graduate seems very low compared to the number of words I have found for myself even in my weakest languages. Until somebody comes up with a better explanation I'm inclined to see it as an artefact of the research methods used. Edited by Iversen on 23 April 2014 at 10:20am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 212 of 319 23 April 2014 at 1:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hear, hear, Iversen. Well said. I've been trying to say the same thing. This figure of 3300 words for a university graduate in French is totally meaningless. Just a quick note on the value of the year abroad in France for the development of language skills. The original author seems to pooh pooh the importance of this experience and alludes to the likelihood that students spent much time in expatriate communities and had little contact with the French language. This is I find really hard to swallow. I fully recognize that it is not always easy to make friends with natives who may be more interested in practicing their English than helping others with their French. But wait a minute here; the students are not exactly on vacation for a year in France. They are there to study. And they are not living in caves cut off from the rest of the world. They have to eat, they go into stores, they interact with French people publicly, they hear French around them; they observe and learn. And, frankly, put a bunch of 20-year old kids in an environment far from home and parents and watch the hormones at work. I don't buy this idea that after a year abroad most kids learn nothing. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 213 of 319 23 April 2014 at 1:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
It seems to me that we are again falling into the trap of seeing these exams as tests of language knowledge rather than the ability to communicate in the language, which, at least for me, is the whole premise of the CFER system. Contrary to what is written here, the goal of the examiners is to evaluate how well you communicate using the language. As I have said again and again, there are no specific linguistic criteria. You are simply expected to use the language in a manner that is to be expected at the given exam level. At the highest level this means sophisticated and nuanced language usage for complex subjects. This does not mean that there is a set list of words that you must use otherwise you will be penalized. Neither does this mean that you will lose points because you failed to use a certain point of grammar despite being able to brilliantly express yourself. The whole idea is to be able to communicate in the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4533 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 214 of 319 23 April 2014 at 2:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
Of course the last part of your statement would apply equally well to expat communities, like here in Berlin, where people make very little progress in learning German unless they make a very active effort to learn the language. Going to eat, interacting in stores, and talking to German people (since mostly this is done in English), and even hearing German does little to build vocabulary. You need to actively engage in the language for that to happen, and you don't really need to very actively engage in English when many others speak it around you. Edited by patrickwilken on 23 April 2014 at 2:12pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5009 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 215 of 319 23 April 2014 at 2:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
Now this is just plain wrong and offensive. I know dozens of people who went for a year abroad at the age between 15-25. And all of them used the opportunity well. Most studied, some partied more, that is true but it's not as common as older people think, some worked the whole time. All of them learnt the language really well. Those who didn't learn the local language were those who went for a study program in English which is still a foreign language for them. The trouble is not the age and I hate when someone talks about young people the way you do, it's just the same as saying the same derogatory thing about women, blacks, jews or whoever else. The trouble is that English natives in general have a harder time with immersion, unless they are stubborn enough, because many more people in the target country become language bandits when it comes to English than when it comes to Czech or Swedish. That is simple logic. It has nothing to do with age. Edited by Cavesa on 23 April 2014 at 2:38pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 216 of 319 23 April 2014 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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