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Language competence | ||
Tags: CEFR Language Levels | Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5451 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes  Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 25 of 80 03 October 2010 at 9:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
On the other hand, computer that would pass "Turing test" for native fluency, would necessarily pass the original Turing test as well. :) (since in a Turing test language is the 'tool' for discrimination between man and machine) Edited by Aineko on 04 October 2010 at 6:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mcjon77 Senior Member United States Joined 6614 days ago 193 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Egyptian), French | Message 26 of 80 04 October 2010 at 12:20am | IP Logged | |||||
I definitely agree with this. My grandmother did not learn to read until she was 62 years old (she died just shy of 100). Yet few would say that she was not fluent in English. I know many people who cannot read and write in their native language beyond the most basic things, yet would we say that they are not fluent? Illiterate, yes, but certainly still fluent. Edited by mcjon77 on 04 October 2010 at 12:20am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Old Chemist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5176 days ago 227 posts - 285 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 27 of 80 04 October 2010 at 9:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree - literacy is another issue - there are many languages which are not written and whose speakers have no native words for "modern" concepts and yet,of course, their languages cope with all the complexities of the speakers' lives.
I have never heard of the Turing test as evaluating the intelligence of the speaker, as H.Computatralis states, I thought this was to do with a philosophical discussion of artificial intelligence, that if a computer or any device that communicates could appear to be human it must therefore have some sort of intelligence to be able to adapt its speech - I think the original was a machine and a person communicating by some sort of typewritten display - well enough to fool the recepient of the communication. I suppose this would be a good assessment of linguistic competence, taken metaphorically. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 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 28 of 80 05 October 2010 at 11:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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I mentioned the Turing test because it seems to me that that the idea behind it could be used for a test for competence.
If a suitably educated and knowledgeable native speaker doesn't discover that you are a foreigner when communicating 1) purely by sound 2) purely in writing then you have attained near-native competence - though in case 2 limited to written skills. The jury is still out on whether you could inversely be mistaken for a native speaker orally, but revealed through errors committed in your writing. Ultimately the test would be relevant if you wanted to claim that a certain language translator had attained the level of a human translator - though that is still way into the future. The original formulation of the test refererred to artificial intelligence, but if you wanted to claim that a certain language machine not only could translate, but actually SPEAK (or write) the same way as a human - like HAL in 2001 - then you would also have to acknowledge that that machine was intelligent. .. gosh, one innocuous reference and so much discussion Edited by Iversen on 05 October 2010 at 11:01am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5337 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 29 of 80 05 October 2010 at 12:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
I was once told by a Spanish woman that if there was a blanket between us so she could not see me, she would have sworn that I was Spanish. When I was younger I was often told in markets or places where people first saw me, and then heard me speak, that "Oh, I thought you were a foreigner". At which I would sweetly reply: "Yes, people often think that." If people would belive you are native on the phone, that is good enough in my book. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Romanist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5285 days ago 261 posts - 366 votes Studies: Italian | Message 30 of 80 05 October 2010 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It could be argued that a person needs to be good enough to pass himself or herself off as a native speaker in order to qualify as being truly 'fluent' in a language - I can certainly see the intellectual case for this definition.
But isn't this, as it were, elevating the technique above the art? It seems to me that WHAT a person has to say is ultimately far more important than how correctly or elegantly he/she is able to say it. Let's imagine we had a choice - we must spend a month on a desert island with one of the following types of foreigner: a.) A really intelligent and interesting person who speaks slightly broken English b.) Someone completely dull and boring who speaks error-free English without any accent. How many people would opt for 'person b' here? :-0 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 31 of 80 06 October 2010 at 2:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
I know that many people enjoy talking about fluency because it is a very interesting topic. I do however find it curious that in the midst of all this heated discussion there seems to not have been any mention made of two things. First of all, fluency has a very technical definition in the world of linguistics and second language teaching. It refers to fluidity of speech and can be measured in very precise ways. Of course, nothing prevents anybody from using the word fluency in many other ways and especially as a synonym for proficiency. Secondly, there is very comprehensive system of assessment of second language skills known as the CEFR and based of many years of research and discussion. We don't have to use it, but I can't fathom why we don't at least acknowledge the existence of it. My humble suggestion is that rather than starting from scratch and rehashing for the umpteenth time definitions of fluency or proficiency why not see how we can improve what already has been accomplished? Edited by s_allard on 06 October 2010 at 3:17pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6442 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 32 of 80 06 October 2010 at 5:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
It's definitely possible. I had a classmate at one point, in an intermediate Italian class. Native Italians were shocked that we were in the same class; at least some of them thought she was a native speaker. Her writing was terrible, though - it was quite filled with non-native grammatical errors. More generally, I know quite a few people who are very fluent in spoken English, but write significantly worse than they speak, while making very non-native errors. 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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