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Is C2 possible without a tutor ? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6553 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 129 of 144 22 December 2014 at 8:49am | IP Logged | |||||
You've been told many times that you are wrong about this, so why are you bringing it up again, and pretending that everybody agrees with your opinion? To put it simply, it takes a much lower skill level in listening to be good at conversing than "general" listening. If the learner prefers to have a listening skill level comparable to her conversation skill level, then she most likely have to listen more hours a day than she converses. My estimate for becoming a good listener, stolen from The Wordbrain, is 1500-2000 hours. For conversation, pulled out of my ass, 400-800 hrs. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4536 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 130 of 144 22 December 2014 at 11:25am | IP Logged | |||||
I am often struck by how people overestimate the value of tutoring. Different strokes for different folks, I guess... Edited by patrickwilken on 22 December 2014 at 11:25am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 131 of 144 22 December 2014 at 2:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
Please, let's be civil here. First of all, I apologize for assuming that everybody agrees with me. Second, I was wrong. I must acknowledge that some people do speak better than they understand. Third, I have been told this many times here at HTLAL although I don't believe it. In the case of the two C2 candidates here, I'm trying to reconcile what I see is a huge discrepancy between listening and speaking skills in one case. I'll forgive the insulting tone and admit that there is something in the argument put forward by this poster. The kind of oral comprehension skills necessary for high-level conversation are different from the skills necessary for the listening examination. That said, the inquisitive mind in me still questions why do so many people - but not all obviously - tell me that their receptive skills are better than their productive skills. I have never met anyone who claims that their written French is better than their reading or that their speaking is better than their oral understanding. I see here at HTLAL than many people have long lists of languages in their profiles. I wonder how many people can claim that their speaking skills are better than their oral comprehension skills. In fact, and here I have to admit that I'm slow and obtuse, I just don't understand how one can have great speaking skills and poor oral comprehension. For example, I can watch a movie in Spanish and understand everything, but my spoken Spanish doesn't come close to anything I hear on the screen? Are there people for whom it's the opposite? Are there people who can speak Mandarin perfectly but can't understand it when spoken? I'll admit that there are issues of register. For example, one may speak great English but not understand American slang. Or maybe it's question of regional varieties. But other than that I haven't seen any examples here or anywhere else of people who speak English better than they can understand it. Edited by s_allard on 22 December 2014 at 3:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4668 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 132 of 144 22 December 2014 at 2:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I suppose I could imagine, just for the sake of theorizing, someone who masters pretty well the grammar of a language and has a vocabulary of at least several thousand words in it but has had little opportunity to listen to the language other than from their non-native teacher (who, we will say for the sake of argument, has a thick non-native accent). This person might be able to express fairly complex ideas with few major grammar mistakes but might also come up sorely lacking in terms of listening (to native speakers anyway). Edited by tastyonions on 22 December 2014 at 2:48pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 133 of 144 22 December 2014 at 3:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Ever the doubting Thomas, I decided to look at the scientific literature on this question of better
speaking than oral comprehension skills. Under the larger of umbrella of receptive versus productive skills, there is not the slightest hint of evidence that learners can have better productive than receptive skills. The area that seems to be most studied is vocabulary. Receptive vocabulary is always much larger than productive vocabulary. Here is a typical observation: If you've ever been around toddlers, you've noticed that they understand words and phrases way before they can say them: A fourteen-month-old child, for example, may respond to language like "Let's put on our shoes. It's time to go now" well before she is able to say things like this herself. Just as this child's receptive vocabulary is much larger than her productive vocabulary, our students' receptive vocabulary remains considerably larger than their productive vocabulary. In fact, virtually every literate adult has a much larger receptive vocabulary — including, of course, you. You know lots of words that, for a variety of reasons, you simply do not use when you speak or write. This difference in vocabularies is easy to understand. When you read or listen, the words have already been used in context; your primary job is to extract meaning from them. You are not required to know everything about a word in order to understand it fully. Knowing a word is a matter of degrees of depth: knowing the gist of a word is, quite often, all you need when you hear or read a word. As you become better acquainted with a word, you begin to know its nuances, connotations, etc. In other words, you must be in control of a lot of information about a word before you are able to use it properly. Receptive vs productive vocabulary We are told by a poster that there is a distinction between "general" listening, whatever that is, and listening for conversation. "General" listening seems to be harder and requires more hours whereas listening for conversation requires much fewer hours. This is a rather strange distinction that does not appear in the scientific literature. I can only surmise that "general" listening in this case refers to a more formal language read from a written source such as in a lecture or a conference. On the other hand listening for conversation is more informal and something akin to banter or small talk. But even here, most people - but not all - say that rapid-fire conversation between natives is much harder to understand than the language of a radio or television newscaster or a conference. To come back to our example of Learner 1 in the C2 exam, are we to assume that the language used by the examiner was much easier to understand than the language on the listening test? Maybe. But it's interesting to note that Learner 2 scored higher on the Listening test than on the Speaking test. Edited by s_allard on 22 December 2014 at 3:24pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 134 of 144 22 December 2014 at 3:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
One has to be careful about one's sources. I read the interesting little book quoted here and came across this relevant passage about speaking vs comprehension: From the very beginning, comprehension has a head start over speech production – when you stutter your first barely intelligible sounds, you already possess a vast passive repertoire of hundreds of words. The disparity between good language comprehension and poor language production usually persists throughout a lifetime. Many people may one day read Thomas Mann, Hemingway, or Voltaire, but only a few will develop their writing skills. Speaking skills have another disturbing characteristic: they are subject to heavy erosion. Stop speaking a second language for a decade or more, and even simple words such as ‘Goodbye’ are suddenly irretrievable. At the same time, listening and reading skills are hardly impaired. It seems as if once you acquire the ability to understand with native-like proficiency, you have acquired it for life, like riding a bicycle. The speaking abilities, on the contrary, would need continuous stimulation to be maintained. There are two explanations for this phenomenon. The first is quantity. Unless you are incorrigibly logorrheic, listening is the predominant function mode of your word brain. As soon as you find yourself in a group of at least three people, the odds are that you will listen rather than speak. The bigger the group, the smaller your contribution. In some situations – at school, university, or during meetings at work – you could listen for hours, and nobody would expect you to contribute more than a word or two. As a result of years of listening, the part of your word brain that processes sounds is better trained than the part that produces speech. The second reason is diversity. The words put into your brain are more diverse than the words coming out of it. You have only one life to tell – your own – while your co-humans make you listen to hundreds of different lives in different places and in different circumstances. You know words annunciated by fascists, fundamentalists and populists that you wouldn’t want to ever pass your lips. You know hundreds or thousands of words from listening to priests, rabbis, and imams, but, again, you would not want to use them yourself because, as a scientist, you feel that God and the gods exist because our ancestors had the wisdom to create them. This list can go on and on, including people from different professions, geographical regions, age groups, etc. Because of the huge variability of human biographies – sometimes disgustingly ugly, but most often creative, stimulating, and refreshing – you know thousands of words you will never utter. What you know of the world is more than what you can say about it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4536 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 135 of 144 22 December 2014 at 4:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
Actually that does happen. I knew a philosophy professor here in Germany who meet a couple of new students at the airport, and quickly realised that while their German was good enough to read German philosophical texts, they had virtually no ability to speak or understand spoken German. Presumably they had learnt to translate German texts into Chinese, but never been taught how to speak or listen. He was a bit shocked as he had had email communication with them, and had thought they would be able to participate in seminars etc. Come to think of it how many people would pass the spoken or listening part of the C2 Latin exam? Edited by patrickwilken on 22 December 2014 at 4:37pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 136 of 144 22 December 2014 at 5:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" - Charles Caleb Colton. Great minds think alike. The positive chap I am, I always look on the brighter side of things. Despite the attempted insult, I see an interesting question here: Am I overestimating the value of tutoring? I have given a list of reasons why I think good tutoring is wonderful, especially for exam preparation. But I have also clearly outlined that tutoring is not for everybody. I think that many people, maybe most people here at HTLAL, would not see any benefit in tutoring because they are able to do everything on their own. I do not think tutoring is a magical solution. It cannot provide discipline or motivation. It does not replace hard work. And above all, there are ways to get the benefits of tutoring without the use of a tutor. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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