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What is good enough? | ||
Tags: CEFR Language Levels | ||
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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 65 of 79 16 January 2013 at 3:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thank you for the excellent samples! One thing to keep in mind is that these students are writing about unfamiliar subjects, by hand, within a time limit. And they generally don't have any reference materials. When I first tried this, it was a bit of a nasty surprise—it's a lot harder than writing a post on lang-8, where you have the tools and the time to do a good job. So take this into account if you're evaluating your own writing. But the B2 samples definitely capture the "very mediocre high school student" quality of spontaneous B2 writing. If you give those people reference materials and extra time, they could write a half-way presentable essay. Still, my tutor would have been pretty unhappy with some of those B2 mistakes. Maybe the French care more about that sort of thing, or maybe my tutor was stricter than absolutely necessary. But if I had handed in those letters, they would have come back with a big stack of corrections and a request to do better the next time. 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 66 of 79 16 January 2013 at 6:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
is Eddings popular in Finland? it was actually my friend from Oulu who recommended him to me when I mentioned LOTR, saying the translation is pretty good and that I'd probably like them :) I've never heard of him in Russia really and I don't think I've seen any books, though I've also not been looking for them. ordered Eddings in Italian today, btw. Edited by Serpent on 16 January 2013 at 6:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4559 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 67 of 79 17 January 2013 at 8:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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@Serpent:
In Finnish. I've always liked reading, but I guess you could say I 'found my genre' when I read LotR the summer before 3rd grade. My first book in English was Into the Labyrinth by Weis & Hickmann a couple years after that. Eddings used to be popular, or at least fantasy-popular. As far as my understanding goes, he was the biggest name of the 90s fantasy boom in Finland, so a lot of people around my age know him by reputation even if they've never read one of his books. He hasn't had as much success since then, and let's not forget that, in the grand scheme of things, fantasy is only a minor genre with very limited mainstream appeal (with the exception of guys like Tolkien and George R.R. Martin). 2 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 68 of 79 17 January 2013 at 10:04am | IP Logged | |||||
These sources are very instructive because they combine content criteria, evaluation criteria and examples at different levels (passed with flying colours, barely OK, junk). But at least for me they raised a general problem, namely whether logical structure or the lack thereof in a text always is correlated with the purely linguistical level of the author. I do remember cases where I have had to reformulate something while writing because I couldn't find a way to express exactly the ideas I had in a certain language. This could be caused by just one missing headword in my dictionary, but also by some doubts about a certain grammatical construction. However some persons may not even be able to think and write logically in their own language, and then it may be tad unfair to blame it on their language skills. Basically this evaluation system can't be said simply to evaluate linguistic skills - it incorporates an evaluation of the general mode (I daresay quality) of thinking of a person. Edited by Iversen on 17 January 2013 at 10:06am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 69 of 79 17 January 2013 at 1:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
And this is a key insight into the whole CEFRL system: these exams were never designed to tell you how closely you approximate a native speaker. Instead, the exams were designed to test what you can do with your foreign language. It's a subtle difference, but it starts to matter once you reach B2. For example, some of the reading comprehension questions on the DELF B2 would have been slightly irritating in my native language. And I'm quite sure that many native speakers would flunk the average C2 exam, which demands university-level academic skills. Of course, when you think of the audience for these exams, this makes perfect sense. Nobody cares whether a student's French sounds native (and certainly nobody's going to demand test scores to prove it). But various organizations do care whether the student can handle university coursework, or write a persuasive business memo. However, there's one complicating factor here: The passing score for a CEFRL exam is often 50% or 60%. If you have native-like language skills but you can't think or write clearly, you may be able to give up lots of points and still pass them exam. Or if you're smart and well-organized, you can get by with bigger holes in your language skills. And we shouldn't forget that organizing your thoughts in a foreign language is useful skill in and of itself. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mezzofanti Octoglot Senior Member Australia mezzoguild.com Joined 4748 days ago 51 posts - 112 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Arabic (classical), Arabic (Egyptian), Irish, Arabic (Levantine) Studies: Korean, Georgian, French | Message 70 of 79 17 January 2013 at 2:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks for providing those samples. It really shows why people shouldn't be grading themselves according to the CEFR scale without having taken a test. To write at the level of the examples in that C2 sample there takes even the most motivated person quite a long time to achieve. I really think that the CEFR scale has been devalued by so many people making self- assessments. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 71 of 79 17 January 2013 at 4:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
True, it's really easy to skim Wikipedia and overestimate your level. And there's no denying that C2 exams require serious language skills. However, the Council of Europe used to publish a self-assessment checklist on their website. I've already mentioned it several times on HTLAL, because it's a fairly reasonable self-assessment tool. And this shouldn't be too surprising, because the Council of Europe actually put together the CEFRL standards in the first place. Here are the writing criteria for C2:
This is clearly not as accurate as the examples and grading instructions that petteri posted. And there's more room for self-delusion. But if you can truly "write narratives about experiences in a clear, fluent style appropriate to the genre" and produce "well-structured complex letters… to authorities, superiors or commercial clients", you're at least in the same ballpark as those C2 samples. But alas, accurate self-assessment requires a certain amount of self-awareness. And as the Dunning-Kruger effect demonstrates, one of the root causes of incompetence may be a blindness to one's own shortcomings. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4688 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 72 of 79 17 January 2013 at 4:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
I respectfully disagree. One of the founding purposes of the CEFR and one of the reasons WHY it is so valuable is self-assessment. See section 1.5 Access to certification exams requires significant expenditures of time and money that are not always feasible for everyone (e.g., when taking the exam requires an intercontinental journey), but a key feature of the CEFR is that it allows people to have a more meaningful idea of where they stand without the need for a professional certification exam. Furthermore, as the post just above notes, in many respects a certification exam cannot be perfect, and will provide results that gauge things other than pure language competence, such as intelligence and education level generally, ability at gaming tests, or in some cases sheer luck. I'm sure we would both agree that many people have inflated ideas of how competent they are, but I don't agree that this means we should try to discourage of eliminate self-assessment. Consider that without self-assessment according to CEFR and similar systems, most people would instead simply be arguing ad nauseam over whether or not they are "fluent," and we know how pointless that argument can be. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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