The CEFR Levels and Immersion Learners

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german2k01
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The CEFR Levels and Immersion Learners

Postby german2k01 » Sat Dec 17, 2022 11:19 pm

Hello Guys,

I am thinking about this question for a while. I thought that I should just ask it.

What level do you think these language immersion learners (input based) be on CEFR level if they sit a test after three years of immersion so to speak?

Considering the fact that such learners get most of their inputs through TV shows, news broadcasts, movies, animes, podcasts, novels, blogs, and mangas. etc

However, testing schools test your language knowledge based on the formal form of the language. All four skills. This is what I am learning in a German language class here in Germany.

I found listening very challenging even though I have done thousands of hours of listening. For example, our teacher reads out the transcript.

His intonation gets changed all of a sudden. He seems like someone who has a Dialect. And then I have to look out for keywords for answers all the while writing them out and then concentrating on the next set of questions. Otherwise, during normal teaching/speaking, I can understand him 99% with no problems.

I just want to quote someone(Sergy from Russia) who followed input-based learning on LingQ, used it as the main tool, and took an official test in German conducted by Goethe Institute. He scored B1 in the actual exam. He has been learning it there for the last three years.

or do you think he lacked certain exam strategies?

P.S.: if my memory serves me right someone(I do not know who it was) here on the forum was telling Le Baron such language immersion learners do not have a higher level beyond A2 or B1 in most cases and the actual cefr exams are tough.

I came across a post by a native German on Quora who was a professional writer in the German language and took an official exam for fun. She wrote that she only achieved the C1 level.

Thanks
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Re: The CEFR Levels and Immersion Learners

Postby badger » Sun Dec 18, 2022 12:55 am

german2k01 wrote:I found listening very challenging even though I have done thousands of hours of listening. For example, our teacher reads out the transcript.

His intonation gets changed all of a sudden. He seems like someone who has a Dialect. And then I have to look out for keywords for answers all the while writing them out and then concentrating on the next set of questions. Otherwise, during normal teaching/speaking, I can understand him 99% with no problems.

have you asked him about it? are you in an area of Germany with a noticeable accent & the teacher is switching to formal/neutrally-accented German?
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Re: The CEFR Levels and Immersion Learners

Postby Kraut » Sun Dec 18, 2022 1:45 am

badger wrote:
german2k01 wrote:I found listening very challenging even though I have done thousands of hours of listening. For example, our teacher reads out the transcript.

His intonation gets changed all of a sudden. He seems like someone who has a Dialect. And then I have to look out for keywords for answers all the while writing them out and then concentrating on the next set of questions. Otherwise, during normal teaching/speaking, I can understand him 99% with no problems.

have you asked him about it? are you in an area of Germany with a noticeable accent & the teacher is switching to formal/neutrally-accented German?


He may switch his tone to some degree for training purposes. In an exam they are not going to listen to their course teacher after all.
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Re: The CEFR Levels and Immersion Learners

Postby Gaoling97 » Sun Dec 18, 2022 3:16 am

Question is impossible to answer. It depends on the learner's native language and any languages they have previously learned, the language they are studying, how they are studying, and how much time they put into it.

I did once meet an American (who, as far as I know, did not speak any other languages besides English) who (as far as I know) spent 25-30 hours a week learning German, primarily through immersion and sentence cards in Anki (though it was one of his college majors and he did take classes and spend a semester(?) in Germany) and he was able to pass a C2 exam in 2.5 years. When I say "primarily", I mean I think the balance was much heavier on the "immersion" side of the spectrum, but that the other things I mentioned were also non-negligible, so you can draw whatever conclusion you want from that.

On the other hand, I probably put in a similar number of hours using similar methods when learning Chinese (as a native English speaker who was already at an advanced level in German), and after 2.5 years I am frankly not sure I was even B2 level, let alone C2. (Obviously CEFR exams don't exist for Chinese and I am just speaking approximately.)

I will say in general that I do not think immersion only learning is very effective. It will work, long term, but will not be anywhere near as fast as immersion based learning, where you spend most of your time consuming comprehensible input + grinding vocabulary in Anki, possibly bootstrap yourself at the beginning with an A1 textbook and occasionally spend some time with a teacher to refine your output. I can absolutely believe that somebody who literally does nothing but watch TV would not make it very far, as was the case of that linguistics researcher who studied French for 1700 hours with nothing but TV with no subtitles...and could not even pass B1.
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Re: The CEFR Levels and Immersion Learners

Postby german2k01 » Sun Dec 18, 2022 10:04 am

have you asked him about it? are you in an area of Germany with a noticeable accent & the teacher is switching to formal/neutrally-accented German?


I asked him about it. He just said that he had no dialect. He just said your intonation gets changed when reading out text.
At the school where I am studying teachers do not use mp3 audio for listening exams. Teachers simply read out the transcription for the listening part of the exam. It is not just me but every student in the class finds it difficult to comprehend it. Obviously, it is going to influence your final grade for the listening section.

I am thinking about how I can practice active listening really well more so when someone is reading out the text.
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Re: The CEFR Levels and Immersion Learners

Postby german2k01 » Sun Dec 18, 2022 10:12 am

He may switch his tone to some degree for training purposes. In an exam they are not going to listen to their course teacher after all.



This is my school https://www.perfekt-deutsch.de/ situated in Dortmund, Germany. For exams like telc, DSH, etc they may do it the way you suggest. I have not taken such official exams. However, there are three exams within a course duration to officially pass the level and move on to the next level. I do not know if it is a school policy for teachers to read out the transcriptions instead of using audio files.

No doubt active listening seems really tough no wonder Benny did not pass his listening exam even though he was listening in German 24/7.
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Re: The CEFR Levels and Immersion Learners

Postby german2k01 » Sun Dec 18, 2022 10:23 am

I will say in general that I do not think immersion only learning is very effective. It will work, long term, but will not be anywhere near as fast as immersion based learning, where you spend most of your time consuming comprehensible input + grinding vocabulary in Anki, possibly bootstrap yourself at the beginning with an A1 textbook and occasionally spend some time with a teacher to refine your output. I can absolutely believe that somebody who literally does nothing but watch TV would not make it very far, as was the case of that linguistics researcher who studied French for 1700 hours with nothing but TV with no subtitles...and could not even pass B1.


Very interesting thoughts. I think I have to include some intensive studies as well in my language routine on top of immersion-based learning.
Maybe start adding words from my reading in Anki and also start incorporating active listening as well.

As was the case with Sergy who read 4 million words read and listened to content over 600+ on LingQ but still managed to achieve B1 in German.
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Re: The CEFR Levels and Immersion Learners

Postby emk » Sun Dec 18, 2022 11:13 am

german2k01 wrote:What level do you think these language immersion learners (input based) be on CEFR level if they sit a test after three years of immersion so to speak?

It depends on the learner and how they spent their time immersed. It also depends on what CEFR exam they're taking, because some of them are a bit more academically demanding than others.

Here's roughly how the French government interprets the upper CEFR levels (or used to, the last time I looked):

  • B1: "We expect that you can shop and socialize a bit, and that if we allow you to live in France, you might not completely disappear into an L1 bubble."
  • B2: "We'll admit you to a university as a foreign student, but the first 6 months will be pretty brutal even if we provide support services."
  • C1: "We'll admit you to a university as a foreign student, and expect you to do the work." (In the US, a C1-equivalent TOEFL score will get you into Harvard as a foreign student, provided you otherwise qualify.)
  • C2: "We'll admit you to law school. Good luck."
The upper levels aren't just about casual conversation. The main people who care about the upper-level CEFR tests are universities and employers. And so the upper-level tests do expect you to be able to write essays, read complex texts, and defend an idea orally.

The French DELF/DALF exams appear to run slightly harder than, say, Spain's exams. Or at least they used to? For example, for my B2 Oral exam, I was given a choice of two prompts drawn from a bowl. I chose, "Should Paris institute congestion charging for driving in city, like in London?" (The other choice was something hideous about education theory.) If I recall correctly, they gave me 20 minutes alone in a room with nothing but a blank sheet of paper and a pencil to prepare. Then, they took away my notes! I had to give a 10-minute "structured presentation" arguing for or against congestion charges, without my written outline. (Imagine a classic 5 paragraph essay: An introduction, then make 3 separate points and argue for them, and then a conclusion.) Then I had to answer questions for 10 minutes, including questions like, "Well, your proposal might help the environment, but wouldn't it hurt the poor, who can't afford to pay the fees?"

They didn't expect me to be brilliant or anything. Like, as long as I could perform at a level where I wouldn't actually flunk a high-school civics class, that would be more than enough. But those are the kind of skills they were testing for.

For listening comprehension, they used native news radio, which they played on cheap speakers above a noisy street.

Also, a handy CEFR tip: Make sure you can talk about the environment. There are about 10 topics that show up a lot on CEFR B2 and up exams, historically (the environment, high school, learning a language, etc). And if you get hit with a question like congestion charges, don't argue for your real beliefs. Argue for whatever position is easiest to support with the vocabulary you know. You don't want to discuss the economics of congestion charges (unless you actually know about economics). You want to talk about how reducing traffic helps fight global warming, because you prepared for talking about global warming and/or endangered species. Changing the topic without actually changing the topic is a valuable CEFR skill.

So for someone who is immersed for years, they probably have the raw language skills. But I would recommend reading the news, reading adult non-fiction books, discussing current events with people, and spending some time writing short essays and getting corrected. There are professional exam tutors for upper-level exams (mine was talented and sadistic and made me do a weekly oral exam for 10 weeks running). The test isn't, "Can I speak this language socially?" It's "Could I muddle through university or office work?" Or in the case of B2, "Could I at least pass a high school civics class if I worked hard and the teacher had pity on me?"
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Re: The CEFR Levels and Immersion Learners

Postby tiia » Sun Dec 18, 2022 11:16 am

So the intonation change is as soon as your teacher starts reading out loud? I may have misread this as happening during the reading part.
It's totally normal to have an intonation change when reading out loud.

So I recorded the same text from wikipedia four times. (Unfortunately the sound quality is not perfect, especially with allthe s-sounds.) Can you hear the differnce in intonation? Is anything of that close to what your teacher is doing?
1. what I would call normal reading out loud for a text like that.
2. normal, but quite fast. This may be if I would be checking some facts in a discussion with natives.
3. Tried to read a factual text like a story.(Hey that's quite difficult and therefore sounds a bit unnatural.)
4. Tried to read it like I would speak it. (Again not too easy, as I had to omit all the small fillers a normal spoken language would include. It sounds more like a presentation.)
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Re: The CEFR Levels and Immersion Learners

Postby german2k01 » Sun Dec 18, 2022 12:59 pm

He sounds like someone in recording 1 and recording 3. With these kinds of recordings, you have to look out for keywords for your answers. :lol: sure, as a rule, he has to read out the text twice for listening purposes. But still, students find it challenging. Don't you think it is really challenging indeed?
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