The 'driving license' approach to learning (languages)?

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zenmonkey
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Re: The 'driving license' approach to learning (languages)?

Postby zenmonkey » Tue May 03, 2022 7:14 am

My youngest is taking her baccalaureate exam for English now even as I write. She’ll test for German later in the year. And obviously French since she’s in the French system.

We expect she’ll score well. I doubt any student could get a 15 or above here without strong operating knowledge of the language because the majority of the evaluation exam is contextual and juried approach that addressed speaking and listening (writing and reading are present but not as important).

They had all the prep through mock exams etc to learn how to test. But it’s a false dichotomy to say these teaching methods are just learn to test versus learning the language. The students that score well speak well. If you’re getting a passing 11 or 12, everyone knows your language skills are limited.

The exams are the end evaluation but the kids that learn, learn to master the languages over 5-7 years, and those that don’t, they’ll never do well in the overall language exam, no matter how much they prep just for the exam.



Funnily enough, I have had a driving license in 4 languages.
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Re: The 'driving license' approach to learning (languages)?

Postby mrwarper » Tue May 03, 2022 9:06 am

zenmonkey wrote:We expect she’ll score well. I doubt any student could get a 15 or above here without strong operating knowledge [...]
Just to be sure what that means: 15 or more out of...? Back in the day we had to score 65% to pass language tests, however misguided these number things are anyway.
it’s a false dichotomy to say these teaching methods are just learn to test versus learning the language. The students that score well speak well. If you’re getting a passing 11 or 12, everyone knows your language skills are limited.
Exactly. That's why this attitude baffles me. Learning only the test will work out in a limited range of subjects, levels and/or situations (f.e. getting your driving license ; ), but languages are definitely not one of them, and ever the less the higher the level you test -- that's why you can be sure (the more the higher the level) that people who score well will really have the skills, but also that they didn't study only the test.

5 years or so ago I had this 'driving license'-style fan lady student (a mature, somewhat stuck-up lawyer), who I think was not happy with me, and she told her youngest co-student, who was, 'you want to get a B2 certificate? not with this teacher'. Needless to say, she dropped out soon, and that student --the only one who I told to pay his fee to sit the exam-- passed and got his certificate. I always regretted I didn't write down her number so I could give her a call and tell her 'guess what?' :D
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Re: The 'driving license' approach to learning (languages)?

Postby Iversen » Tue May 03, 2022 10:13 am

I have only had problems with two specific exams, but I passed both. One was in the subject 'law' when I studied for an economical degree because I had problems understanding that law isn't about justice and logic and common decency. The other was French conversation at the university, where I was told that my conversation skills were beyond reproach, but my pronunciation nothing to write home about. However that reflects my general attitude to language learning, and I found a cure: I stopped following the courses in conversation and went on a two week holiday in France, and when I returned home I went to the oral exam one day later and passed with flying colours. So much for courses and class room pedagogics and doing as you are expected to do...

In every single other case I have been so damned sure to pass that I didn't even bother to find out about the curriculum, and I would rather do my own assessments than go to a series of mock exams.

One anecdote with - possibly - some relevance for language learning: for the oral grammar test I drew the question "adverbielle bisætninger" (adverbial clauses), and my first remark when I entered the room and greeted the censor and my teacher was that there isn't such a thing. I drew up a table illustrating all possible allowed sentence structures in French, and then I showed them that those clauses that happened to be adverbial popped up all over the system instead of being concentrated in one corner of it. Therefore the idea that the adverbial clauses form a distinct subgroup is false and should be rejected. It's almost like the fish - you can point to an individual fish and to related groups of fish, but the cladistic distance between a shark and a cod is at least as large as the cladistic distance between the cod and you.

When you have that attitude to exams they can actually become quite entertaining, but signing up for a whole row of mock exams is too much.
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Re: The 'driving license' approach to learning (languages)?

Postby zenmonkey » Tue May 03, 2022 1:29 pm

mrwarper wrote:
zenmonkey wrote:We expect she’ll score well. I doubt any student could get a 15 or above here without strong operating knowledge [...]
Just to be sure what that means: 15 or more out of...? Back in the day we had to score 65% to pass language tests, however misguided these number things are anyway.
it’s a false dichotomy to say these teaching methods are just learn to test versus learning the language. The students that score well speak well. If you’re getting a passing 11 or 12, everyone knows your language skills are limited.
Exactly. That's why this attitude baffles me. Learning only the test will work out in a limited range of subjects, levels and/or situations (f.e. getting your driving license ; ), but languages are definitely not one of them, and ever the less the higher the level you test -- that's why you can be sure (the more the higher the level) that people who score well will really have the skills, but also that they didn't study only the test.

5 years or so ago I had this 'driving license'-style fan lady student (a mature, somewhat stuck-up lawyer), who I think was not happy with me, and she told her youngest co-student, who was, 'you want to get a B2 certificate? not with this teacher'. Needless to say, she dropped out soon, and that student --the only one who I told to pay his fee to sit the exam-- passed and got his certificate. I always regretted I didn't write down her number so I could give her a call and tell her 'guess what?' :D


Ah, the French baccalaureate scale. It's out of 20. Except this scale was at one point one where 20s were impossible and a 10 was ok.

Inflation alas has arrived and the rare 20 has become less rare, grades are averaged against other students, etc... and overall it still remains magically not a linear scale. Anything towards 20 is still very good, anything 16-12 is acceptable and below 10 is a catastrophic bowel movement :shock:. To further complicate things, scores have multipliers and some topics count 2x, 3x, or even 5x depending on various things and the way the wind blows, or so it seems.

65% is still the passing percent for the CEFR-type exams in Germany.

Meanwhile, the German system is 1-5 where 1 is good and 5 is bad. So my daughter is in both and hopes to get an Abi score low enough to go study in Germany. Languages for her are accidental environmental elements although she's quite aware of their utility she's not particularly interested in them as a goal - they're a means to travel and access the world.
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Re: The 'driving license' approach to learning (languages)?

Postby mrwarper » Tue May 03, 2022 3:57 pm

Iversen wrote:I have only had problems with two specific exams, but I passed both. One was in the subject 'law' when I studied for an economical degree because I had problems understanding that law isn't about justice and logic and common decency.
Another 'damn sure to pass' type here. Every time I had "problems" (including my actual driving license test :D) it was due to lack of previous work on my part, so I never got to blame exam designers for asking something instead of something else, as I often see now. As I remember it, it should have never been a problem anyway because nearly all of my teachers up to the SAT level prepared us well, and so we only devoted maybe two weeks at the end of the pre-SAT course to test-centric additional stuff. Before that, most of the class exercises, and 99% of them in college were nearly indistinguishable from exam questions (although teachers --with a very few very good exceptions-- were considerably worse), so big deal.
So much for courses and class room pedagogics and doing as you are expected to do...
Ironically, my certification as a teacher was the one time when I almost didn't make it, although we didn't even have an exam but only a final external assessment by the certificate issuer (Cambridge; I imagine schools keep their claims of 99%-whatever passing stats by filtering out obviously bad teacher material at the admission interview). :D

My problem? Unlike my mates, I had been teaching for years prior to our course, so I had problems understanding that our mock classes were not about teaching students a single thing -- they were about doing as we were expected to, i.e. the standard language teaching industry class we were being 'taught' (in the likes of which I would never enroll), and absolutely nothing deviating a comma from that. What did you say about law and justice?

zenmonkey wrote:It's out of 20. Except this scale was at one point one where 20s were impossible and a 10 was ok.

Inflation [...] To further complicate things, scores have multipliers and some topics count 2x, 3x, or even 5x depending on various things and the way the wind blows, or so it seems.
I see. Inflation aside, which I think has become more or less universal, multipliers, and especially unequal ones, are usually a sign that exam designers finally realize not all test bits are equally important --and naturally can't be put on equal footing--, but they still don't have a clue how to go about it. Of course, if they bothered to ask teachers --gasp, God forbid-- it wouldn't be too hard to figure that a generally 'simple'* way is to make unimportant questions depend on the important bits, so if you fail unimportant questions you may get an imperfect score and still pass but if you fail the important parts you hit a wall.

*I realize it's not necessarily simple to decide what parts of a given subject matter as covered are more important, or how much so exactly, but the multipliers thing is generally ridiculous.

Languages for her are accidental environmental elements although she's quite aware of their utility she's not particularly interested in them as a goal - they're a means to travel and access the world.
Sound reasonable. Just like plants are to my butterflies ;)
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