Over Here

I like it! It gives me a good sense of where I’m at and an idea of what to work on to improve.

I’d say I’m a 5 in Swedish (lots to learn!) and an 11 in Spanish. When I actively spoke Spanish, I could have scored it at a 13.

That’s a good point, Erika: your overall proficiency can vary over time. When people ask me how good, say, my German is, I wonder whether I should reply based on how it was when I lived in Germany, or based on how good it is right now.

The key question is, what would it take to bring you back up to speed? For example, if you spent time in Mexico/Germany/what have you, would you get right back up to your highest-achieved level? I tend to think it doesn’t take too long to do achieve that.

I like it, too. I’ve found it very hard to classify my language skills, and “beginner,” “intermediate” and “advanced” never seemed quite right.

(Of course, this system makes me sort of sad to realize how low I’d score myself for Japanese, even though I had 3 years of college-level study. Actually, I don’t think I advanced much number-wise from the first year to the 3rd in Japanese. I probably got as high as an 8, but now am lower again.)

Hallo! Swedish lingust and media personality Fredrik Lindström has proposed another test: Just open a kitchen drawer. If you can name everything you see, then you are proficient. But in your methodology of course, this would signal a wide vocabulary only for a non-chef.

Anyhow, I think your grading is great and way better than e.g. that of the EU, which asks employees to grade “Linguistic skills” in the areas Written/reading/conversation according to these categories:

Mother Tongue
Fluent (only in conversation)
Good
Average
Elementary

Different people would presumably interpret good and average in different ways, so the result says very little. Also I think “mother tongue” could be more of a biographical information than a true sign of language skills. How do you grade an illiterate Englisman?

Alejna: I know what you mean. I also had Japanese in college, but I haven’t used it in years, to the point where I probably couldn’t even give myself 4 points–a problem for the system. That brings us back to Erika’s issue, and the resulting question of how you should rate your skills: how they are this moment? How they would be after a day of conversation? A week in the country? A month?

Jonas: I agree that the European system is not ideal. Especially because “good” can mean almost anything and “average” presupposes that the person doing the rating actually knows what the average is.

Although I find Lindström’s test amusing, I can’t agree with it, for two reasons: (1) in order to have any need to say, for example, “strainer”, you have to have lived in the country in question; (2) even if you have lived in the country, you may not have done any cooking, so you wouldn’t need to know “strainer” any more than “steamroller”.

In fact, I’d say that Lindström has hit on a uniquely challenging exercise; I remember one time I was in a group of people who were all very proficient in at least one other langauge, and we came to the conclusion together (don’t ask how) that none of us knew the word for “funnel” in any langauge but our mother tongue. There are a great many household implements that one very rarely needs to talk about, but that doesn’t mean that one isn’t proficient. To conclude, if you can name everything in your drawer, you’re probably proficient, but if you can’t, it doesn’t say much.

OK, Jonas, I’ve just done a test. In my office drawer I have exactly the following items:

pen
ball-point pen
marker
pencil leads
staples
letter-opener

I am clearly proficient in English. However, I can name only about half of these with confidence in Swedish. (Interestingly, I know the words for some of them in German, for others in Spanish, etc.) Since I would give myself a 3 out of 5 on my own scale above for vocabulary in Swedish, I must admit that it looks like the test may have some merit. But it also may be a coincidence. I’ve also only been in Sweden for three months, so I haven’t had to do a lot of refilling of mechanical pencils here yet. But I’m not convinced that says much about my overall vocabulary.

More test results: I just applied Lindström’s test to another drawer, and was able to accurately name everything in it: ingenting (nothing). So I am proficient after all!

Keep them drawers coming! Yes, the drawer-test is a bit funny but also revealing in a way. On the constructive side, i suppose you could see any drawer as a metaphor for a domain in a persons vocabulary. Still, the metaphor has its limits, imagine fitting domains like “shipping”, “climate” or “space” into a drawer. Behold thou lord, creator of all enclosed spaces in desk-like pieces of furniture!

Amen, Jonas. Next week…closets!

Mind if I join in, Gregory — or is it off-limits to professionals in language assessment? :) We should have talked about this when we were both in Ann Arbor.

The drawer test is a lot of fun, and actually something like that has been used a test of language dominance by researchers on bilingualism — name all the things you can think of in the kitchen, in the classroom, at the office … in English, and then do the same in Spanish. Seems to be a useful measure.

What about comprehension? When I arrived in France after SEVEN YEARS of French classes, I could express myself decently but could not understand anything anyone said to me.

John: Hello! (Meaning: “Cheese it–the cops!”) It’s kind of you, as one of those people who actually do this kind of thing for a living, to chime in. I especially like that when you say “we should have talked about this”, you leave off the “so you wouln’t make such a fool of yourself”.

At any rate, I very much like the “name all the things you can think of” version of the test, since it avoids the arbitrariness and difficulty of the drawer test (I have since realized that I don’t know the English name for some things in our kitchen drawers). And doing it in two languages is clever, since it then doesn’t become a test of your general memory, but focuses on vocabulary.

Now that you’re here, I should ask: What’s your favorite multi-dimensional scale for measuring proficiency? I promise I’ll go look it up.

Aimee: See the previous blog entry. And I sympathize.

Well I don’t know whether I have a favourite but, since you’re now residing in Europe, you can hardly go past the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) for Languages. It offers you six levels of proficiency and all the “can-do” statements you might wish for.

One neat way to explore the framework is to access a web-based diagnostic system called DIALANG, which allows you to assess your proficiency in various skill areas in any of 14 major European languages. Just go to www.dialang.org and see how good your Swedish really is!

John, yes, I have tried Dialang! I believe I scored in Swedish at upper-intermediate, despite the fact that I tried it one night after a couple of glasses of wine. One problem with online assessment.

I especially liked the assessment test in Dialang that asks you simply whether words exist or not. It’s a very clever way of getting at competence.