How many years does it take to learn the second language as your native?

[Xmmm]

I always wonder about those vocabulary level things.

If most writing for adults is at the 8th grade level, doesn't that mean what we call 8th grade is the adult level?

Where do these grade level things come from?

I guess there is a target listed somewhere, but if we are going to evaluate people on arbitrary standards that some professor, who does not teach language learners, sets, why not pick another one that sounds better.

I'm a middle school teacher in the US, and I get grey hair from arbitrary standards set by people who do not teach, which define students as below average, and the teachers who teach them as failures.

Sorry; I just hate "grade level standards". The glass is half full. I insist that it is.

Now I'll probably go back to talking about "grade level standards" just like everybody else.

edited to add a couple of words.

"Grade level" in the US, in the context of reading material, is determined by a computer algorithm. I don't know the exact details of the algorithm, but it is mostly or entirely driven by the length of individual words and the length of sentences. You can take Microsoft Word (if it has the Fleischman reading level tool in it ... they seem to have removed it in recent versions of word). If the text comes out as 12th grade level, just go through and break a few sentences in two. Run it again and the level will drop to 11.4. Replace all occurrences of "authoritarian" with "bossy" and it will drop to 10.8.

I don't see anything arbitrary about it and it's enormously helpful for teachers at the elementary school level, who don't personally have to read hundreds of books of children's literature and try to design some progression that will appeal to each and every student. Instead they can say "You tested at 3.7. Go to that shelf there and pick any book with a red sticker." And the red sticker (or whatever) will be books with a reading level between 4.0 and 4.9, a very nice n+1 experience for the kid.

It's the opposite of arbitrary, actually. It's a hundred percent objective. The algorithm doesn't carry if it's Harry Potter, the Bible, or the Necronomicon.

[MorkTheFiddle]

I always wonder about those vocabulary level things.

If most writing for adults is at the 8th grade level, doesn't that mean what we call 8th grade is the adult level?

Where do these grade level things come from?

I guess there is a target listed somewhere, but if we are going to evaluate people on arbitrary standards that some professor, who does not teach language learners, sets, why not pick another one that sounds better.

I'm a middle school teacher in the US, and I get grey hair from arbitrary standards set by people who do not teach, which define students as below average, and the teachers who teach them as failures.

Sorry; I just hate "grade level standards". The glass is half full. I insist that it is.

Now I'll probably go back to talking about "grade level standards" just like everybody else.

edited to add a couple of words.

You can take Microsoft Word (if it has the Fleischman reading level tool in it ... they seem to have removed it in recent versions of word).

Perhaps you mean the Flesch reading level. Computing the readability scores is certainly not arbitrary, as you say, but I've not seen the data showing the correlation of readability score to grade level. In other words, how do we know that such and such a readability score equates to such and such grade level?

[aaleks]

The most common vocabulary size for foreign test-takers is 4,500 words

When I took the test the first time (4.5-5 years ago) my result was very close to that. Now it's 20,900 words http://testyourvocab.com/result?user=9030875 even though I don't live in an English speaking country

Foreign test-takers tend to reach over 10,000 words by living abroad

So those numbers might be inaccurate.
Besides, I think my real English vocabulary is less impressive.

[Xmmm]

Perhaps you mean the Flesch reading level. Computing the readability scores is certainly not arbitrary, as you say, but I've not seen the data showing the correlation of readability score to grade level. In other words, how do we know that such and such a readability score equates to such and such grade level?

I know a lot of elementary schools use the Accelerated Reader program, which uses the ATOS scale. I think some school library are starting to use ATOS too, but don't quote me on that.

ATOS takes into account the most important predictors of text complexity—average sentence length, average word length, and word difficulty level. The results are provided in a grade-level scale that is easy to use and understand.

ATOS Level

I'm not an expert in this area and will say no more, but it seems objective enough. And I've heard about AR success stories for many years from my wife.

[reineke]

Some 10.7 percent of the non-native test takers know between 20,000 and 30,000 words. On average, test-takers living in Northern Europe, Belgium, Croatia, and Romania know around 14,000-16,000 words.

"The largest proportion of respondents (4.7%) know 4,500 words (or are in the range from 4,250–4,749, technically). Looking at it another way (not displayed on the chart), the median vocabulary size for all respondents is 7,826 — half know more, half know less. But remember that these statistics, while they might be fun to compare yourself against, merely reflect the people who have taken this online quiz from all over the world, and is in no way representative of the world population as a whole. Percentages for people who know less than 1,000 words are not even shown on the chart (the data is too spotty/erratic so far).

However, this doesn't mean we haven't found anything else interesting. To the contrary! Because while our data isn't fine enough to find much correlation between vocabulary size and the number of years of English classes taken, we did find great differences in average vocabulary results for the following questions:

...

Academic performance: On average, in the English course(s) you took, how would you judge your performance in the classroom, relative to the other students you studied with?

Academic performance helps, up to doubling your vocabulary size. But that doesn't tell us what helps academic performance.

Outside of class: How much did/do you use English in "real life", learning things outside of the classroom? (Watching TV, listening to songs, writing, travelling, etc.)

Outside of class is the biggest difference. Students who do "lots" of things in English outside of class have more than twice the vocabulary of those who "don't do much."

http://testyourvocab.com/blog/2011-07-2 ... n-learners

[Jon]

Reading / writing like a native: Entirely possible.

Listening / speaking like a native: Impossible.

Reading yes
Writing NO WAY
listening probably
Speaking pretty hard definetely unlikely but maybe obtainable

[lavengro]

Reading / writing like a native: Entirely possible.

Listening / speaking like a native: Impossible.

...
Writing NO WAY
...

I'll let Joseph Conrad and Samuel Beckett know: give it up fellas, ain't no way it's gonna happen!

EDIT to add: Oops, I just noticed that DaveBee made exactly the same point last June. Memo to self: don't read threads backwards!

[aaleks]

Writing NO WAY
....
Speaking pretty hard definetely unlikely but maybe obtainable

Why? In my opinion there are two things which could give you away as a non-native speaker: word usage (or usage of language, etc) and accent. But you don't need to have a native-like accent to pass as a native in writing.

[reineke]

Reading / writing like a native: Entirely possible.

Listening / speaking like a native: Impossible.

Writing NO WAY

List of exophonic writers

This is a list of exophonic writers, i.e. those who write in a language not generally regarded as their first or mother tongue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exophonic_writers

They forgot Pressburger:

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Pressburger

[Theodisce]

An interesting list, reineke, thank you. However, it does not take into account Greek and Latin (and other
"classical") literary traditions. As a matter of fact, it was writing in ones native language that was considered extravagant in the middle ages (more so around 1000 AD. than 4 centuries later, but still). On the other hand, the language of medieval Latin hymns would most probably have surprised Cicero (but the language of his speeches was hardly the same language "common" people spoke in Rome). Be we can go even deeper. Did Augustine write in his native language? And if he didn't, was his native language Punic or Vulgar Latin? Even some books of New Testament were written by people whose native language was something other thank Greek. Those authors couldn't probably benefit from having a native speaker correct their writing. This leads me to a question concerning modern exophonic writers: do (did) they have their texts proof-read by native speakers? Is there some evidence for or against it?