|
 |
Being precise about fluency? | ||
Tags: Fluency | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4909 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 1 of 48 24 November 2012 at 11:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
[This came up (again) in another thread. Rather than hijacking that thread further, I
thought I'd scratch the old wounds in a new thread.]
Anything is perfectly acceptable if enough people do it, right? But let's think about being useful and avoiding confusion. Using fluency when you mean proficiency just leads to endless discussions that go around and around because each person participating in the conversation understands the key word to mean something else. Yes, in popular usage, fluency means you know a language really well. But we're supposed to be language learning enthusiasts here. We can insist on people being reasonably precise with our key terms. Would Star Wars fans accept it if we called Boba Fett a stormtrooper? Would a historian accept if you called Henry the VIIIth a Victorian? If I'm having a conversation with someone who doesn't really care about languages, I would never insist on them being precise with words related to learning languages. But at the level of conversation we have here, a bit of precision would help a lot. I agree with all of those who prefer descriptive linguistics over prescriptive linguistics. Languages change and evolve no matter what people do to try to stop it. But we would save a lot of time and confusion by maintaining distinctions between words which refer to quite different things. So, to get to my point, when I use the word fluent I mean something like the following, (from dictionary.com):
2 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 2 of 48 24 November 2012 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
umm, your examples include "fluent French" and "fluent in six languages"...
The discussions of fluency/proficiency have to do with the concept of the terms. If we all start avoiding the f-word and saying "I'm proficient/I want to be proficient" we'll be having discussions about what proficiency means and how proficient is proficient. So I don't think it's wrong for us to say fluent when we mean proficient. There are so few cases when we discuss the actual fluency without taking into account the accuracy/proficiency. Speaking of the terms used by the general public, it's much more important to use bilingual/trilingual to mean only one's native languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Asperger-glot Diglot Newbie Denmark Joined 4546 days ago 16 posts - 22 votes Speaks: Danish*, English Studies: Dutch, Serbo-Croatian, Persian, Arabic (classical), Pashto, Polish, Bulgarian, Russian, Turkish Studies: Mandarin, Romanian, French | Message 3 of 48 24 November 2012 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
I find this matter a bit hard to grasp.
I have this personal definition in order to make matters easier: A1 semi conversational very limited proficiency A2 conversational &n bsp; limited proficien cy B1 conversational &n bsp; moderate proficiency B2 basic fluency good proficiency C1 advanced fluency high proficiency C2 native fluency very high proficiency Edited by Asperger-glot on 24 November 2012 at 5:20pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4909 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 4 of 48 24 November 2012 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Both examples refer to how easily a person can speak. I guess the point is you can be fluent in one language or many. But it's not my example, it's the dictionary's.
This is very true, but it also leads to misunderstanding, because people who respond understand different things. It is interesting that you use the phrase "the actual fluency". You can't be fluent without having a degree of proficiency. But I could say the same thing about vocabulary and grammar. I can't use my vocabulary very well without a certain amount of grammar, and vice versa. But we don't say vocabulary when we mean grammar. They are intimately related, but they are not interchangeable concepts. And I think this is the main reason to keep to words clear: we have two distinct but related concepts. Asperger, if you want to keep things clear in your mind, don't mix up the two related but distinct concepts. If you look through the CEFR descriptors, some refer to fluency, and others refer to proficiency. They do assume that as you become more proficient, you will also become more fluent. Nevertheless, they do distinguish between them in describing each level in the scale. 2 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 5 of 48 24 November 2012 at 6:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I used "actual fluency" to mean the narrow definition of fluency. 2 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 6 of 48 24 November 2012 at 7:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4909 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 7 of 48 24 November 2012 at 8:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It is clearer if you look at the whole sentence: 2. able to speak or write smoothly, easily, or readily: a fluent speaker; fluent in six languages. Some dictionaries do include proficiency as one of the definitions of fluent, because it is what people often use the word to mean. But this particular set of definitions all focus on the ideas of smoothness, ease, flow, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5669 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 8 of 48 24 November 2012 at 10:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
If you will forgive the self promotion, one of my videos discussed this very issue What is Fluency?
4 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
