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Grammar or vocabulary for exams? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5757 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes  Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian | Message 1 of 5 24 October 2010 at 1:28pm | IP Logged |
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I know there have been numerous discussions on this forum before about whether to prioritise learning the grammar or the vocabulary of a language, but I hope with this post to start a discussion about the priorities of examiners. In terms of exams, there are obviously a couple of very good arguments supporting both sides of the story, but I want to see what your attitudes towards exams are.
I have always been pretty good at grammar in foreign languages. There was a time where I thought that was the most important thing for exams. My thinking was that if my grammar were faultless in an exam situation then there would be much less chance of my being misunderstood and that would translate into really high exam results. As I got closer and closer to the end of school and even closer to the more important exams I realised that this wasn’t true at all. Looking at the mark schemes for speaking exams and essay-writing papers, I found that the mark for grammar was consistently much lower than the mark allocated for stuff that generally translates to “getting your point across well” or developing a sophisticated argument. This means vocabulary and bucket-loads of it – and I find learning vocabulary is much more difficult for me than grammar in almost every language I have any knowledge of at all. So sometimes, I might go into an exam and have a pretty average level of vocabulary – bearing in mind that I, like many of you who may be reading this I’m sure, am a perfectionist. Due to my pretty average level of vocabulary in some cases (French is a prime example for me), I might sometimes find it difficult to express more complicated ideas. So this would lead to my having a near-perfect if not perfect score for grammar and a pretty good but not overwhelmingly awesome mark for “getting my point across” or whatever fancy terminology they use for that. This frustrates me to no end. Why? Because when results day comes around, I get a mark I’m pretty pleased with but also there are people with a pretty similar mark to me whom I know for a fact cannot string a grammatically correct sentence together on almost any level at all. To me, that should mean that they get a pretty poor mark -because I can sometimes read their work and the grammar part of my brain wants to cry. For example, in German class I once read one guy’s essay after a mock paper and he had used every single noun in the essay in the nominative case with incorrect genders on not too far off every line. For any of you who haven’t studied a language with cases before, using the nominative case (the case for the subject of the sentence) for every noun is a crime. So we end up with people who finish school with a respectable grade on paper for languages and yet when they’re thrown in the deep end they collapse faster than one of my disastrous attempts at baking a cake, and that’s just no good. The other side of the argument, of course, is that there is no use in being able to string a grammatically perfect sentence together if you can only express simple ideas and opinions. Now, my questions to you, I suppose, are as follows: Which side of the debate do you agree with and why – at least this is my experience – has the system not been made more fair? The way I see it, someone who can speak a language grammatically perfectly but can’t say much is just as useless as someone who can express anything under the sun in a grammatically incomprehensible way. It would not take much to just even out the mark allocations – fifty percent or close to for each section. Is it purely just that they're making exams easier to make schools’ marks seem more impressive, do the examiners think the concept of getting your idea across is easier than grammar? Okay, rant over. Thanks for reading and hopefully answering :] Jack EDIT - No idea what I was thinking when I posted this thread in this subforum. If any of the moderators think this should be in another section (and I think it should be) then please move it :] Edited by LanguageSponge on 24 October 2010 at 7:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6430 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 5 24 October 2010 at 1:38pm | IP Logged |
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It's amazing how well people can get their points across with utterly broken grammar. Barry Farber's book has some examples of using a dictionary to make sentences along the lines of "we go meat-person" to get people to go to a butcher, without applying any case declensions or conjugations - and if I recall, this was in a language which has plenty of both.
I know long-term expats who always use the infinitive in Italian. I even know people who use random conjugated forms - ie, present first person singular rather than past second person plural, with no rhyme or reason or pattern to it. Does this cause confusion? Certainly. Do they usually get their point across in the end? Amazingly, yes. Broken grammar is not as incomprehensible as one might think. Getting your point across really is king, in most situations, painful as it may sound. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5838 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 5 24 October 2010 at 2:00pm | IP Logged |
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With such a question we first have to differentiate between school exams, university exams and external language exams.
My school expierience is from the 1970, I passed my "Abitur" exam in 1980. In Germany school tests are called "Klausuren". In my school tests there was always a so called "Fehlerquotient" calculated: Number of mistakes divided through number of words in total. A mistake was a mistake, whether it was a vocabulary mistake or a grammar mistake. In English we had to summarize texts and interpret them. With such tasks I had the freedom of choice, which vocaburlary I used. Of course I was bound to some keywords of interpretation, but apart from that I could avoid too complicated vocabulary. My experience with external language exams was quite different. I have never seen them corrected, because you only get your final result and your diploma. But already in the preparation courses we were told that we should use the specific vocabulary (in my case: the specific business vocabulary) everywhere and we should show off with using this as much as possible also in the oral exam. Because I knew this in advance, I prepared myself by learning all the required vocabulary, which was a huge amount. Grammar was not even a topic in my prepration courses. So I would say that these exams were pedominantly focused on vocabulary learning. I did not have a problem with this, because it was clear from the beginning that vocabulary learning was the essential point. Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 24 October 2010 at 4:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6002 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 4 of 5 24 October 2010 at 3:18pm | IP Logged |
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The simple answer is to do whatever the marking scheme rewards, which as you have identified often means vocabulary.
But in the longer term, you have to ask yourself why you're taking this exam. Are you after a grade or are you learning for interest. If you're simply after a pass, learn the vocabulary, spew it onto the page, walk out. If you want to learn the language, then spend most of your time on the language, and that means grammar. But the good news is that another thing that exams generally reward is cramming. This means that you can have the best of both worlds. During the year, you can focus on "learning the language" and then in the last couple of months you can "learn the exam". Memorise words. Make up lists, or stories involving lots of words. If you have to, you can recreate these on the back page of your exam paper to use as you go through the exam. And actually, if you've been learning the language throughout the year, learning words will become much much easier. So there's my answer: Learn grammar in advance, cram lots of extra words at the last minute. You learn the language and get the marks! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5660 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 5 of 5 24 October 2010 at 3:26pm | IP Logged |
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I have a controversial definition of grammar. I define it as anything about a language,
apart from vocabulary, that some other person expects you to know. This helps explain why some grammar books are thin pamphlets with basic verb conjugations, and others are 1000 page volumes trying to pin down obscure details such as where to position your tongue in your mouth for certain letters. Since languages are, effectively, infinite, it is impossible to know everything and no matter how much you learn outside vocabulary, you will say something that somebody sees to be a unbearable grammatical blunder. When deciding how much grammar you should learn, then, you need to think about the expectations of the other person. When I was in Bhutan and learned some basic Dzongkha, people told me that my terrible mangling of the grammar were "minor details". Whereas in my C1 class at the Charles University in Prague, I am jumped on for not knowing something that probably most native speakers think is irrelevant. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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