How do you know if you understand?

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aaleks
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby aaleks » Mon May 22, 2017 7:15 pm

DangerDave2010 wrote:Taking a wild guess, I suppose the reason people fail to understand certain gramatical patterns is due to having worked through an insuficient number of books.

Btw, from my experience sometimes you don't really need to know those grammatical patterns, i.e. learn consciously, to be able to understand them.
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby s_allard » Mon May 22, 2017 7:20 pm

LeCon wrote:I don't think it is important. We don't really understand a lot of stuff in our native language. Functioning is the main goal as far as practicality is concerned.

When we don't have to think about something that's said, we probably understand it.

It is probably quite true that for many people understanding well is not that important. That is a basic principle of extensive reading. There are however at least a few reasons to paying close attention to understanding. First of all, if you don't understand a construct, how can you use it correctly? What most people do is simply avoid things they don't master. Or, worse, they make big mistakes such as using the wrong word or the incorrect grammatical structure.

Secondly, there are certain kinds of texts where understanding is extremely important. Perhaps the most important example is legal texts where details down to punctuation can make a huge difference.
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby tarvos » Mon May 22, 2017 7:36 pm

The reason we hire lawyers to deal with legalese is because most natives don't understand legal texts either.

Honestly, storm in a teacup.
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby s_allard » Mon May 22, 2017 7:53 pm

LeCon wrote:...
Native speakers function just fine and dandy without perfect understanding. It's not that important. Language is about functioning in real life for most people.

Why do you have to use something ? Maybe people are happy not understanding something and not using that particular construction.

Legal text is not an example which has anything to do with normal real life. It's like making an analogy (which i know you hate) with not being able to understand C++ and conflating it with normal language.

I agree that many native speakers function quite well without perfect understanding. It is also true that for many people understanding well is not important. They read or hear one thing but understand something else. Who cares? Similarly, they will say or write one thing and mean another. We see this all the time here in this forum. I personally call this sloppiness or carelessness, but I understand that some people are comfortable with this.

The problem is that in certain situations, as I pointed out, precision in language is very important. I will admit that many people do not read legal texts. But there are various legal professions that do. And many people, maybe not around here, are sometimes confronted with legal texts such as leases, contracts, warranties and many administrative documents.

By the same token, most of us probably do not read medical texts in bed, but at some point in our real lives, we may have to speak to a doctor or read something of a medical nature. Hopefully with a clear understanding.

When students exams, I imagine they try to understand the questions as precisely as possible. And the people who design the exams also try to be clear as possible.
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby reineke » Mon May 22, 2017 7:56 pm

s_allard wrote:It is probably quite true that for many people understanding well is not that important. That is a basic principle of extensive reading. There are however at least a few reasons to paying close attention to understanding. First of all, if you don't understand a construct, how can you use it correctly?


"An understanding of the concept of extensive reading is important because the way it is perceived can greatly affect how it is practiced. Grabe and Stoller (2011) defined extensive reading as an approach “in which learners read large quantities of material that are within their linguistic competence” (p. 286). According to Bamford and Day (2004), “extensive reading is an approach to language teaching in which learners read a lot of easy material in the new language” (p. 1). These two definitions share two important concepts: (a) In extensive reading, learners read large amounts of text; and (b) in order for learners to read large amounts of text, reading materials should be within the learners’ reading-proficiency levels (a somewhat more challenging issue for L2 readers than L1 readers). Bamford and Day expanded the scope of their definition by elaborating on additional features of extensive reading, such as self-selection of reading materials, independent reading, reading for general meaning, and reading for information and enjoyment.

"Three important issues arise from these discussions, which contribute to a more fine-tuned definition of extensive reading. One important feature of extensive reading, specifically, reading materials that are within learners’ linguistic ability, stresses that reading materials should be easy enough to (a) facilitate effortless comprehension without imposing any significant learning burden and (b) keep learners on the task independently. "

"A second key element of extensive reading emphasizes the large amount of meaningful exposure provided in the target language, which plays an important role in language learning. By being exposed to large quantities of meaningful reading materials for an extended period of time, reading fluency and reading comprehension can develop incrementally (Grabe, 2009; Nation, 2009)."

"Implicit learning, according to Kintsch (1998, as cited in Grabe, 2009), involves the incremental growth of habitual associative knowledge, the tacit learning of co-occurrence patterns in the input we receive. Implicit learning is “acquisition of knowledge about the underlying structure of a complex stimulus environment by a process which takes place naturally, simply, and without conscious operations” (Ellis, 2008, p. 121). As defined, implicit learning takes place without awareness of what is learned from gradual and continual multiple exposures to the input. Implicit learning plays a central role in learning to read, contributing to the development of lower level processes in reading and resulting in automatized processing and fluency (Grabe, 2009). Nation (2009) has also argued that L2 reading fluency develops by “making the best use of what is already known” (p. 2); this argument invokes implicit learning as a way to strengthen and stabilize lexical entries and lexical networks. To have an impact on reading development, implicit learning requires considerable amounts of repeated input that develop habitual processing of that input..."

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rrq.152/full
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby s_allard » Mon May 22, 2017 8:36 pm

True to form, reineke's contribution of a citation on extensive reading is rather irrelevant to the subject of the thread because it does not address the issue of what and how the learner understands. The problem isn't whether a text is meaningful or not; it's what do learners understand perceive.

For those who may be even remotely interested, I'll give a concrete example from French. In a recent class, some students had a problem with the following piece of dialogue:

- Est-ce qu'il vous reste des places pour ce soir?
- Désolé, il ne m'en reste plus.

There are many complexities here but I'll choose just one. For some students, the problem was "il vous reste". A couple of less advanced students asked why it wasn't "vous restez". Some asked why the verb was "...restent" to agree with "des places". But, the big problem was understanding the combination of "il reste" and "vous". I'll skip the full explanation that is probably not necessary here.

Some people might say that none of this stuff is really important in real life as long as you have a gist of what is going on. True, but when time comes to use this stuff - if ever that happens, such as in a C-level exam - they key to using it well is to understand how it works.
Last edited by s_allard on Mon May 22, 2017 8:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby tarvos » Mon May 22, 2017 8:38 pm

The problem is that in certain situations, as I pointed out, precision in language is very important. I will admit that many people do not read legal texts. But there are various legal professions that do. And many people, maybe not around here, are sometimes confronted with legal texts such as leases, contracts, warranties and many administrative documents.

By the same token, most of us probably do not read medical texts in bed, but at some point in our real lives, we may have to speak to a doctor or read something of a medical nature. Hopefully with a clear understanding.


It's not so clear-cut. I can read scientific articles on topics that I have studied (say, scientific peer-reviewed studies in respectable journals on nuclear energy), mostly because I have a background in nuclear energy and chemical engineering. Once we get to scientific articles on mathematical proofs or physics, this becomes tougher, and even more incomprehensible when they concern topics I am not familiar with (and I'm university-educated with a degree in exact sciences).

When I speak to a doctor, and I don't understand a term the doctor uses, I ask the doctor to rephrase - doesn't everyone? In medspeak you may talk of influenza, but they're going to call it the flu. Do you normally need to care about what cholangiocarcinoma is? No, but it's a complication of a certain liver disease - it's a cancer of the bile duct.

It's not sloppy - even the best of us simply have areas of expertise and things we just don't know so much about, and this includes the most educated and clever among us. Even someone like my father who is very well versed in contracts, business, and legal dealings, will hire lawyers for certain texts just because he needs to be certain of the interpretation. What is important that those people in the profession are competent. Not everyone has to be competent at everything - that's why we hire specialists to interpret and help us deal with those issues.

Just like we hire notaries to deal with testaments, doctors to deal with medical texts, scientists and engineers to deal with technical documentation, and so on.
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby tarvos » Mon May 22, 2017 8:46 pm

Some people might say that none of this stuff is really important in real life as long as you have a gist of what is going on. True, but when time comes to use this stuff - if ever that happens, such as in a C-level exam - they key to using it well is to understand how it works.


Il vous reste is a very important construction, but it is symptomatic of a much wider problem and I don't think that this is C-level material at all. The positioning of the indirect object in front of the verb using an impersonal construction is very normal in French, and students should start realizing that this is a normal structure at the B-level already:

cf. "cela m'est égal" "Il me faut une tasse de café pour me réveiller..."

It's the equivalent of "You have .... left."

And besides, this is only a problem for English speakers - if you were a Spanish speaker, for example, this would be totally normal: "¿Le quedan más sitios para este tarde?" The only difference is that French requires the dummy pronoun "il", because in French you cannot drop subject pronouns.

Russian has a similar system, etc. etc.

It's just a remnant of a dative construction, very common amongst Indo-European languages but absent in English and more rarely seen in other Germanic languages.
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby s_allard » Mon May 22, 2017 9:30 pm

tarvos wrote:
Some people might say that none of this stuff is really important in real life as long as you have a gist of what is going on. True, but when time comes to use this stuff - if ever that happens, such as in a C-level exam - they key to using it well is to understand how it works.


Il vous reste is a very important construction, but it is symptomatic of a much wider problem and I don't think that this is C-level material at all. The positioning of the indirect object in front of the verb using an impersonal construction is very normal in French, and students should start realizing that this is a normal structure at the B-level already:

cf. "cela m'est égal" "Il me faut une tasse de café pour me réveiller..."

It's the equivalent of "You have .... left."

And besides, this is only a problem for English speakers - if you were a Spanish speaker, for example, this would be totally normal: "¿Le quedan más sitios para este tarde?" The only difference is that French requires the dummy pronoun "il", because in French you cannot drop subject pronouns.

Russian has a similar system, etc. etc.

It's just a remnant of a dative construction, very common amongst Indo-European languages but absent in English and more rarely seen in other Germanic languages.

The question isn't whether this is C-level material or not. Or whether this is only a problem for English speakers and not for Spanish or Russian. And everybody here knows how this works. The issue is how come students say they understand when in fact they don't really get the true meaning.

While we are it, it's interesting to look at the Spanish example so graciously provided above. Contrary to what was stated above, for a Spanish speaker, the French form is not "totally normal" and does in fact present a major difficulty. French says "...il vous reste..." with the verb agreeing with the subject "il" whereas in the Spanish "...Le quedan..." the "quedan" is in the plural form because the subject is "...sitios... This is not an impersonal verb construction in Spanish. This is simply the verb subject word order inversion. For this very reason Spanish speakers tend to misinterpret the French and think that it should be "...restent..." because they don't understand how the French impersonal verb construction works. Somewhat like their English-speaking counterparts. That's exactly a problem I mentioned.

I'll skip all the details such as the form and place of the pronoun in Spanish but suffice it to say that the workings of the impersonal verb construction are quite different in Spanish and French. I can't speak about Russian or various Germanic languages.
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby Speakeasy » Mon May 22, 2017 9:45 pm

tarvos wrote:The reason we hire lawyers to deal with legalese is because most natives don't understand legal texts either...
The reason why legal texts are so difficult to understand is that they are written with a view to restricting an ill-intentioned individual's claim that their infractions or failure to conform represent a "reasonably valid" alternative understanding of the text, or a well-intentioned and justifiable misinterpretation of their legal obligations ... see ya in court!
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