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Is comprehension measurable? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4064 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 153 of 211 22 August 2014 at 6:14pm | IP Logged | ||
Remember casual conversation language is about making key distinctions about a situation clear to other people, and the method of expressing that changes depending on the information you need to communicate. Just because some people feel it might be appropriate to express a vague feeling as a % in certain situations, this doesn't mean its best practice for all situations or that we all have a % comprehension meter hiding in our brain somewhere. As previously touched on I think %s are most helpful for visualizing comparisons between two or more similar experiences. But, a lot of times it's clearer to say "I understood almost all of this kids book, and barely any of this novel". However "I understood quite a bit of this novel, and a good bit more of that novel" gets murky, so because they're similar we have to come up with more specific language for the distinction we're trying to make clear, and we'll say "I understood 70% of this novel, and 85% of that one". We're expressing the same vague feeling but because there isn't a huge difference in the level of comprehension a % may be easier to visualize. But everyone wouldn't necessarily make the distinction that way, and in this situation someone else might prefer to say "I felt I ran into about 10 unknown words per page on the this book, and 5 unknown words per page on that book". It's not about which one system is more or less accurate than another because no measurements are being taken. Its about trying to find the clearest way to communicate what's essential about the experience. And by the way, there's no rule that says a specific percentage must be decided upon. When you say you understood somewhere between 1 and 7 % that's something I can visualize pretty well. So congratulations, you successfully communicated a vague feeling with %s. Not too hard is it? Edited by YnEoS on 22 August 2014 at 8:09pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5240 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 154 of 211 22 August 2014 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | ||
I've heard this argument before. Percentages are used to make conveying a difference easier, i.e. I understood 70% of this novel and 85% of that one" rather than "I understood a lot of this novel and more of that one." Using percentages seems clearer than words. There is a 15% difference in the level of comprehension. This I understand. The question that I keep coming back to is this: Is there a clear and specific method for arriving at a given figure? If I want to say that there is a 15% difference between my level of comprehension of two levels, I could just as well say 50% and 65% or 80% and 95%. In other words that 70% is still guessing. Sure, I could say that I understood between 1% and 7% of that German film but I'm still guessing. I could just as well say 7.5% or 8%. There is, actually, a concrete example of this percentage comparison. In another thread on the Bow Wave theory, the OP explained that he had obtained a 50% comprehension Latin American Spanish telenovelas and after being away from Spanish for three years (I think), when he again looked at a Spanish telenovela, his comprehension was now 90%. What is important here, I imagine, is not the actual figures, but the fact that the comprehension nearly doubled despite the lack of contact with Spanish. I don't want to rehash the debate of that thread here, but my question then and now is still; Why these specific figures? If these figures are just fuzzy estimates, as many people seem to be saying, how significant are the differences? Is there a real difference between 70% and 85%. Some people will promptly say of course that there is a 14% difference. And what is that supposed to mean? After some thought, I'd like to suggest the following compromise: a four-value system for the assessment of reading comprehension as follows: Nothing = 0 - 25% Some/Little: 26 - 50% A lot = 51 - 75% Total/All = 76 - 100% It's fully compatible with guessing. I'm totally happy to say that my possible 7% comprehension of the German film is really Nothing because it doesn't amount to that much anyways. If you say that you read a French novel with 95% comprehension, why quibble? That's probably more than many native speakers understand. In my book that's total comprehension. Edited by s_allard on 22 August 2014 at 10:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7015 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 155 of 211 23 August 2014 at 1:03am | IP Logged | ||
I'm 110% sure the difference is actually 15%. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4064 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 156 of 211 23 August 2014 at 1:05am | IP Logged | ||
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The difference between 70% and 85% is huge to me, because regardless of whether there was really mean 30% and 15% of unknown content, there was roughly half as much unknown content in the 85%, which seems like a big and noticeable shift.
The specific numbers are fuzzy but they are anchored by something. Like if I reported 75%, you could say why not 70 or 80% instead? Well 90% is clearly too much and 50% is clearly too little, and maybe 70% and 80% were both in the ball park, so I just settled on 75% because it's a nice number. Surely I could move it around a bit, but we're not doing anything with the numbers that requires incredible accuracy so its unimportant. You can use your % decoder system if that suits you, but I think its attempting to too strictly systematize human communication that's usefulness lies in its adaptability and richness of expression. It might make sense in many situations, but I think you always have to take the context of the discussion into account to fully understand what information the speaker is trying to draw attention to. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6407 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 157 of 211 23 August 2014 at 1:35am | IP Logged | ||
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Besides, 25% isn't nothing. Even 5% or 0.5% isn't nothing, for that matter.
And don't even get me started on lumping together 76% and 100%, or basically any other part of the scale. They're as different as a weak B1 and strong B2. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5240 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 158 of 211 23 August 2014 at 3:30am | IP Logged | ||
As I pretty much expected, some or many people believe in the precision of a numeric system despite the fact that the base figures are based on the vaguest of estimates --or feeling-- and nothing else. Why 75%? It's not because we actually determined 75%; it's because it's between 50% and 90% and between 70% and 80%. So when we say the difference between two figures is a certain percentage such as 14% or 15%, what does that correspond to? The answer is basically always the same: Trust me, I know it when I feel it. My proposal of a four-point scale is not going to fly - not that I expected it to - because people can't wrap their head around the fact that in reality the significance of the difference between understanding 0% and 25% is probably not that big after all. And the fact remains that despite all this talk and some interesting ideas nobody has been able to show how one could comprehend 75% of Harry Potter. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4064 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 159 of 211 23 August 2014 at 4:29am | IP Logged | ||
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So let's group the reading into 4 levels
Reader's Verbalization of Feelings ----------------------------------------- Reader's Feeling of Comprehension ----------------------------------------- Reader's Comprehension Processes ----------------------------------------- Author's Original Feelings and Intentions Between the author's intention and the reader's comprehension, who knows all the ways one could mean to understand. Probably the reader will never fully understand the text in every single way the author intended it, but considering the author wrote the text to be readable for other humans, they can probably understand the essential points in most common cases. The actual comprehension process as somewhat described before is incredibly complicated as well, and involves a mix of understanding words and grammar and making assumptions about pertinent details in piece together a picture of the "story". Then there's the reader's feeling of comprehension which is filled with all sorts of cognitive biases, and is completely unaware of how the deeper processes actually functions. They don't even necessarily know what it would mean to fully comprehend a text in all its nuanced details. However, even though actual comprehension is a black box of unknowability [without scientific testing], one assumes that the feeling of comprehension does correlate to it in some way. So if our feeling of comprehension increases we assume our actual comprehension increases, though we don't know how or in what way it increases. Now when we're trying to communicate this experience we know there's no way to give them direct access to our feeling of comprehension, but we know the system works the same way for them so we try to verbalize it in a way that they can imagine those feelings and relate to their own experiences. Counting words has the advantage of being measurable, we know someone else can go through the same steps and the results will be comparable. The problematic portions of counting words is that it leaves out certain aspects of comprehension like following the overall story, and it involves some error of judgement for new words we think we can figure out with context, or only extract partial meaning out of, like "this is a past tense verb with a stem I don't understand". Feeling is a lot less concrete, but we're fairly equipped to discern big gaps in descriptions of feeling. Everyone understands the difference between "I understood a few words here and there" and "I understood almost everything" even though who the hell knows what "almost everything" means in specific terms. So under the surface of every casual conversation is the implicit understanding (whether the speaker of conscious of it or not) that the same cognitive biases and limited understanding are always in place and that the process works a similar way for both participants. So when I'm trying to convey this vague fuzzy feeling I have, its possible to make no claim of it being any sort of accurate measure to the complex processes going on in my brain, but still realize that it is in some way a distorted reflection of those processes, and that this distorted reflection will be similar to the same fuzzy feelings other people experience and people will be able to compare it to their experiences and judge them accordingly. Edited by YnEoS on 23 August 2014 at 4:30am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5185 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 160 of 211 23 August 2014 at 12:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ynenos, I was following you until your last sentence. The fuzzy feelings are useful only when comparable to YOUR other fuzzy feeling experiences. When you have had the fuzzy feeling that you understood 1 at 70% and then understood 2 at 80% the number 75% is going to make a lot of sense to YOU. But, your fuzzy feelings cannot be comparable to my fuzzy feelings or the fuzzy feelings of anyone else.
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