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Article: Students fall short on Vocabulary | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 97 of 319 12 April 2014 at 4:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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For whatever it might be worth, I don't think that memorizing enormous vocabulary lists will help much with the typical upper-level CEFRL exam. Too much stuff is hard to explain without seeing the words in context, and often.
Also, the exam topics are somewhat predictable up through B1 for many languages. (The DELF B1 exam, for example, is pretty found of travel and day-to-day living.) But with B2 and up, you never know what the topics will be: deforestation in Africa, the pros and cons of single-sex schools, British retirees who don't speak French, or whether Paris should have congestion-based tolls. Well-designed CEFRL exams test skills, not vocabulary, and one of the skills that's expected from B2 up is the ability to bluff your way through a semi-intelligent conversation without being too obvious about the holes you're trying to hide, and without having much warning of the topic beforehand. But on the other hand, if you look at a 250-word page, and you've never seen 15 of the words before, you're in for a rough exam. At the upper levels, it's nice knowing that you can read the entire text in 10 minutes of the allotted 55, and understand everything without guessing or misunderstanding idioms. That leaves you time for the important stuff—is the author, say, actually lying about his intentions? And if so, what's the best answer to question 6? (For some fun examples from another part of the exam, see sctroyenne's résumé exercises.) And of course, it doesn't matter than any given exam paper will only use 1,500 actual words. It's not like they give you a copy 10 days in advance and allow you memorize all the vocabulary that's going to be on the exam. No, maybe you'll get an exam topic about deforestation, or maybe one about traffic congestion, or maybe one about the relation between men and women at work. You have to be ready for a wide range of things, even if only 2 or 3 will actually appear. The topics for the oral presentations are quite literally drawn out of a jar. (Fortunately at the B2 level, nobody expects you to have really precise intellectual vocabulary; for the active skills, you just need to be able to summarize the topic and defend your own viewpoint. There are usually ways to cover for key missing vocabulary.) And that brings me back to the study that started this thread: British university students, who have presumably spent years studying French, who only know 3,300 of the 5,000 most common words. To quote it again:
This is painful, because something like 2,500 of those 5,000 are pretty transparent cognates. Here's a few from Routeledge:
For an English speaker to have passive knowledge of only 3,300 of the most common 5,000 French words is actually kind of awful, at least beyond the beginner levels. Seriously, if you actually devote three or four years of your life to specializing in French literature, French culture, etc., you should have a decent passive vocabulary. In fact, you really ought to be able to sit through a university lecture given in French, take notes, and submit a mostly grammatical and reasonably idiomatic essay. Or read Candide comfortably. But according the paper, French majors can no longer cope with lectures in French, and much of their reading is translated. Sure, the purpose of a French degree is "critical thinking" and "culture", but it would be nice to do a lot of that critical thinking in French. And English is often a terrible language for learning about French culture: we have this weird, romanticized view of Parisians sitting in cafés, discussing philosophy, deconstructionism, and and films d'art et d'essai. The reality is a lot more complex and interesting. I can't tell you what an English-speaking Japanese major or Russian major should be able to do after four years. But an English-speaking university graduate who majored in French should surely be able to cope with lectures in French, and should find the idea of reading French works in English translation a bit odd. The dirty secret is that most of this stuff is easy, once you get past the beginner levels: Read 30 ordinary books, and watch a few hundred hours of films and television, and you should be able to deal with a lecture or a reading assignment in French. Throw in a year of immersion, and you should be able to at least muddle through pretty much anything. If nothing else, it's a lot more fun than reading French works in translation even after years of full-time study. Edited by emk on 12 April 2014 at 5:15am 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7205 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 98 of 319 12 April 2014 at 4:55am | IP Logged | |||||
You sound as wise as Socrates. Unfortunately, they put Socrates to death for his heretical teachings. P.S. I thought it was only a certain Deputy Barney Fife like character who could make such a blunder. Unfortunately, I am working for such a Barney Fife. 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 99 of 319 13 April 2014 at 1:01am | IP Logged | |||||
I read the paper in the OP, and there is very little information about how this vocabulary is measured. But let's assume that the figures are correct, it seems to me that it is not the students who are to blame. How can can students major in French and spend a year in France without learning quite a bit of French? What do the students do in a French major program? I find it hard to believe that students specializing in French have such low scores unless the teaching is extremely defective. 1 person has 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 100 of 319 13 April 2014 at 2:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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Well during a year abroad you have so many opportunities that if you don't use them, it's definitely your fault. The author did suggest that the students might be living in an English bubble abroad, or maybe they do learn something but forget it quickly as soon as they stop having exposure.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 101 of 319 13 April 2014 at 5:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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Although I'll admit that measuring vocabulary has all sorts of administrative utilities in terms of curriculum and
course design, I still believe that counting tokens says nothing about the ability to use the language. The author of the paper we are discussing says explicitly the vocabulary size is the best indicator of overall language proficiency. As has been stated earlier, this would simplify language testing considerably. I think that the reason this is not done is that in reality the relationship between vocabulary size and overall proficiency is quite complex. For these reasons, all the exam systems use a variety of methods to assess the various skills. When we speak of using words, there are two parts to the equation. First, there is knowing the individual words themselves. Then there is putting the words into meaningful utterances. Going from the first to the second is the problem. Here is an example: Let's take some of the most common words in English: the, when, go, get, tough. We say we know them because we know at least one definition for each word. Now let's put them into the following phrase: When the going gets tough, the tough get going. How do you get from a list of words to a meaningful phrase? Does "knowing" those five words make you able to understand or use the sentence above? I don't know myself but that essentially is the reason I take vocabulary measurement with a grain of salt. Edited by s_allard on 13 April 2014 at 5:17am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| day1 Groupie Latvia Joined 3892 days ago 93 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English | Message 102 of 319 13 April 2014 at 7:47am | IP Logged | |||||
That is an extremely likely case. I have studied Mandarin abroad, and that has taught me that avoiding the English bubble is actually quite hard. Especially if you're there to study elementary or lower-intermediate course. Who are your classmates? Foreigners, who don't speak such good Mandarin. If you end up in a foreigners dorm (like I did), then you have foreigners surrounding you all the time. So naturally you make a lot of friends among the people around you, and, if everyone's language skills are basic, all the friendly fun thing happens in English. Making local friends is much, much easier, if they speak English. Well, because you can communicate on an adult level. Topics covered up till lesson 20 in any textbook won't get you too far in actual making friends thing. It's easier at higher language levels, when language disability is not so strong and the communication is possible even if it's in that other language only. It is immensely more useful than classes, if you manage to make real friends and/or infiltrate a local group of friends. But unfortunately, many, many people who go studying abroad make English speaking friends (or Russian speaking, or Korean speaking, if their English is also lacking), and, besides classes, the only other interaction with the language, is while shopping and commuting, two activities, which require not too much language skills, if any. It is possible to avoid English on purpose, but not so easy. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5565 days ago 938 posts - 1840 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 103 of 319 13 April 2014 at 12:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As we are discussing only a summary paper by Professor James Milton, and we are
generally not university level linguists, it seems fair that we should look at a fuller paper where he explains his working suppositions, including the importance of vocabulary size to language comprehnsion: http://eurosla.org/monographs/EM01/211-232Milton.pdf 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7205 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 104 of 319 13 April 2014 at 12:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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http://eurosla.org/monographs/EM01/211-
232Milton.pdf ad·um·brate [a-duhm-breyt, ad-uhm-breyt] Show IPA verb (used with object), ad·um·brat·ed, ad·um·brat·ing. 1. to produce a faint image or resemblance of; to outline or sketch. 2. to foreshadow; prefigure. 3 to darken or conceal partially; overshadow. Origin: 1575–85; < Latin adumbrātus shaded (past participle of adumbrāre ), equivalent to ad- ad- + umbr ( a ) shade, shadow + -ātus -ate1 Related forms ad·um·bra·tion, noun Edited by luke on 13 April 2014 at 1:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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