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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 161 of 211 23 August 2014 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm trying not to repeat points I made earlier in the thread. If someone is posting progress in their communicating their sense of their progress. You can't compare those numbers to other people's numbers, but you can make determinations about their sense of their progress, which you may judge to be inaccurate if you don't like their method of determining a %. There's no best practice here that we can decide on. Someone is simply trying to communicate their subjective experience to other people, and if you don't understand what they mean or want different information than what they're expressing, you simply ask for clarification in situation. If you're in a situation where you need to compare results, like if you're trying to compare people's sense of progress for a challenge. Then you need to come up with a standardized method, it can be subjective and fuzzy, but if everyone is using more or less the same system, like say word counting, you know the results will be similar enough to be comparable. If you're doing a scientific study and trying to find out how the human brain works, you'll need much more specific terminology about what you're trying to measure and find out. Human language is flexible enough to be useful in all these different situations. That's why usage of words are slippery and and their meaning changes with context. "I comprehended 75% of Harry Potter" in someone's log carry's different underlying assumptions and communicates different information than "the test subject answered 75% of the story comprehension questions correctly". That's why you can't argue a best practice for communicating % comprehension without specifying in what context and to what purpose. Because everyone's got their own sliding definition of "understanding" and different information they personally would find useful, and for the discussion to proceed in a productive direction we all need to be on the same page about what end result we're working towards. 2 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 162 of 211 23 August 2014 at 3:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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An amusing aspect of this debate that I never expected would last so long is that we are all pretty much in the
same boat. All of us read texts in our target languages and and are confronted all the time with issues of making sense or understanding what we are reading. As Ynenos, James29 and others have pointed out, understanding is often a fuzzy experience for most of us. As also has been pointed out, thinking at the word level is not enough; there are things at the sentence level and even higher. Recently, a friend of mine asked me to explain the meaning of the following phrase that he saw in a job advertisement here in North America: "Local candidates only need apply" None of the five words were particularly unusual. What was the problem? In fact, as native or advanced speakers of English know, the understanding of this phrase hinges on the verb need. It took quite a bit of explaining on my part to show that the local candidates don't need anything. The verb need here is a synonym of "are asked to" or "should". The phrase is a polite way of saying: "Only local candidates will be considered" This is just a tiny example of the problems that we encounter all the time and on a much bigger scale when reading texts. Quantifying the phenomenon is the problem. 1 person has 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 163 of 211 23 August 2014 at 9:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think it's actually the easiest issue. You just estimate the percentage of the
sentences that were undecipherable despite no major vocabulary gaps. I don't normally estimate this separately, but I suppose I generally average it out. For example if I understood 70% of the words but 90% of the sentences, my overall comprehension is some 80%. Or "85% excluding insignificant details". As for comparing different learners, the more important problem is that two people's missing 25% of the text can be quite different. It takes some experience, especially learning languages on your own and reading logs, to figure out how to improve one's comprehension or help someone choose the next book to read. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4638 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 164 of 211 23 August 2014 at 9:58pm | IP Logged | ||
Of course we will encounter problems with unfamiliar idiomatic usages, but the experienced or advanced learner, given enough extensive reading or real-world experience in the TL will gradually master them. I assume that your friend understands that sign now, or if there is any lingering doubt, it will disappear once he has seen similar signs often enough, if they are not uncommon in that part of the world. (It would not be so common in my part of the English-speaking world). And once he understands it, he will understand it completely (it's not that difficult once you "get" it). What I am leading up to is that at the high end of comprehension, it is possible to define comprehension as 100%. It would almost certainly be possible, say, for the advanced learner to have 100% comprehension of a popular novel. Depending on the learner, you could give them increasingly difficult texts and probably begin to find some where their comprehenion is less than 100%. (This could also apply to native speakers of course, depending on education, and the kind of texts being sampled). I would say that apart from the 100% level which could apply in certain cases, I would only bother to quantify at the very high end, even if less than 100%, such as emk and his extensive knowledge of French novels, which he has detailed on occasions in previous threads and quantified his verbal knowledge fairly precisely. And this is easy for him with his e-books and software knowledge, but at that level, it's not that hard even with paper books, since you aren't having to count many unknown words (if any) per page. OK, I was talking there about knowledge of individual words but it would not be difficult to extend that to knowledge of sentences, or clauses. Now, what about very long sentences, which we tend to associate with older literature, say 19th century or earlier, or perhaps early 20th century? (There may be some modern authors who also go in for long sentences, but by and large, it is no longer fashionable). It is possible to understand every word, every phrase, and every clause in such a long sentence, but would we necessarily have a grasp of the sentence (which might in effect be a paragraph) as a whole? Hard to generalise of course and hard to quantify. All I can say is that if you are in a position to know around 100% of the words in such literature, and you read it often enough for long enough, you are likely to master the art of the long sentence, as presumably our great-grandfathers, etc, must have done, and there is no reason why you can't achieve 100% comprehension as well. In other words, I think s_allard is being a little pessimistic. Edited by montmorency on 23 August 2014 at 10:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MRoss Newbie Australia Joined 5988 days ago 15 posts - 21 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, German, Spanish | Message 165 of 211 23 August 2014 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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"I comprehended 75% of Harry Potter" in someone's log carry's different
underlying assumptions and communicates different information than "the test subject answered 75% of the story comprehension questions correctly" ===== In highschool, our entire grade had the fortune (mmisfortune?) of starting each day with 3 classes of English. One of those being Comprehension. Each class involved reading text and then answering questions about it, as a means of measuring our comprehension. That doesn't measure comprehension. That measures retention and recall. Allowing the student to search through the text only partly measures their comprehension of the question as results depend on their search skills. ===== S_allard, your example is a classic example of the idiomatice naturw of language. That the implied message is different from the literal. And that the message giver knows the message receiver can understand the difference and knows what was meant by what was said. A 3 or 4 year old girl made me think about this many years ago. I was doing work at a client's home. On this day the family were outside and their little girl was swimming. She turned to her dad and said, "I want to get out now, I'm freezing..." It stuck with me because... 1. She knew the difference between actual freezing and literal freezing. 2. She knew the coldness she was feeling could be described by the word freezing. 3. She knew the person she was talking to would understand her implied meaning. 4. And she knew this idiomatic manner at such a young age. And I puzzled over those points. How did this come about? No real answer for it. Just happens. In Aust we might say someone has lost the plot. An American might not understand that but will understand lost the farm. When we say some has had a brain explosion we dont mean it literally. The one I find real interesting is when we say someone has gone postal. A saying stemming from the spate of postal works who "lost it". Now, many yeara later, those who don't know the origin of that idiomatic expression still use it to convey the correct intended meaning. So not onky do we have thise small everyday expressions to deal with, we have the addition of the non literal interpretations of some words. And those are different for each language. Interesting challenges for us all. 1 person has 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 166 of 211 23 August 2014 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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The little girl was probably copying what she'd previously heard an adult say? Edited by Serpent on 23 August 2014 at 10:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MRoss Newbie Australia Joined 5988 days ago 15 posts - 21 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, German, Spanish | Message 167 of 211 23 August 2014 at 11:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, that's a given. Every word she knew was a word she had heard someone else say. But she
also knew the context of the word. She knew that what she was feeling could be expressed by that word. It's interesting because at such a young age her exposure to the number of times an adult might have said something was freezing, is very limited. And thinking it through brings other idioms into the mix... Walking outside...oh it's freezing out here, come back in honey and we'll put on something warm. Not warm literally, but figuratively. An idiom breeds another idiom. An Iraqi here on a working holiday asked me what a "bazz" was. "What is the context? How was it used in a sentence?" I asked him. "Bob said he would give me a bazz later." "Buzz. Was it buzz?" "Yes. Buzz. What is this buzz?" "It's a figure of speech. It means he is going to call you on the phone." The interesting thing about the "give you a buzz" sentence is the implied meaning of "give" and what is meant by "buzz". Like the "only locals need apply" example, the literal meaning of give was different to the implied. He understood the act of giving, but not the idiomatic meaning in that sentence. The number of times we use these idioms only comes to light when we speak with an English speaker from abroad, from a non English speaking country. Where they learned the words and meanings but not the idiomatic meaning. 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 168 of 211 24 August 2014 at 2:50am | IP Logged | ||
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Just a little wrinkle to the "75% comprehension of Harry Potter" challenge. Many people may not be aware that there
are substantial differences between the British and American editions of the HP books. A car park becomes a parking lot, a dustbin a trash can, a cooker a stove, and many others. This was done, obviously, to make comprehension easier for American readers. I wonder how much difference this really made. Here's the link 1 person has voted this message useful |
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