An alternative to the CEFR

[Laurence Howells]

Cédric mentioned in his post from earlier today that the silentway.online team—Ros, Piers, Cédric and myself—had been discussing an article we might try to get published on this topic.  

Here's an early draft of this article, which we're are still working on.   It'd be great to have any comments or reactions folk have to this before we take it to the next stage.

Laurence

[Piers Messum]

 Hi Laurence

It's easier to comment on and react to documents that one can interact with. Might you put this up as an 'open to comment' Google doc, or similar?

ATB

Piers  

[Laurence Howells]

Piers, Of course ... but I didn't know how to do that ... however ... maybe this works.  I've set it to 'anyone with this link can comment'  ... let me know if that does the trick.  And the link is below.

Laurence

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mn_TnKXKHo7mGnQuLX7xeuJmD6YH25t9uF-xMZEVazQ/edit?usp=sharing

[Piers Messum]

Working for me. 

I've added some very minor points and suggestions.

P

[Alexandre DO]

Bonsoir,

j'ai lu une copie du document traduite par google qui m'a permis de comprendre l'esprit de cet article. Si j'étais croyant, j'irai bruler un cierge pour que cet esprit pénètre les esprits des décideurs.

Je ne suis pas assez calé en anglais pour commenter quoi que ce soit et pas assez confiant dans la traduction de google non plus. 

J'aime bien qu'il y ait des propositions alternatives et pas seulement une critique. Dans la figure A, je pense qu'il faudrait trouver un moyen de visualiser le décalage souhaité entre les compétences de l'oral et celles de l'écrit.

Espérant être compréhensible

Bravo pour ce travail

Alexandre

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[Laurence Howells]

Alexandre

Merci pour ton commentaire. Je pense que ce serait une bonne idée de préparer deux versions de l’article - en anglais et en français.  Je vais proposer cette possibilité à Roslyn et Cédric.

Laurence

[Roslyn Young]

I think there are problems with how these tests are run. Is the speaking part actually examined, and if so, how is it marked?  This is really quite difficult to do. Are you marking the taciturn candidate down for his personality, for example, rather than for his linguistic skills? Which is better; fluent bad English or hesitant but good quality English? Or do they use some sort of substitute for the spoken test, of the style "if the candidate got 80% on the comprehension section, then we can reasonably grant them 50% on the speaking section with a very short interview, or without testing at all." And how well are the examiners trained? It's really very difficult to examine a spoken test.

There is a test called in French the DCL - Diplôme de Compétence en Langue ( https://www.education.gouv.fr/le-diplome-de-competence-en-langue-dcl-candidats-l-examen-11624 )  It's linked to the European system.

Many years ago, I was part of a group from the CLA who were trained (over several days) to give the test, and several of my colleagues later wrote some of them.  They consisted of a scenario in which, for example, you might be a salesman for a pharmaceutical company selling to Africa. You have to speak to a potential buyer over the phone, interact with him using emails, read up on import details for the country in question, negotiate the prices and conclude with a letter stating the agreement reached. These are some of the things the test might include. So it is a complete situation involving all the linguistic skills. There was a complex grid to help the examiner come to a conclusion as to the level of the candidate.

This test presupposes that the candidate will want to have this kind of activity, so for the conductor wanting to speak with his orchestra, or the history researcher wanting to talk about the Middle Ages with a colleague in Denmark, it wouldn't really be pertinent, of course. 

However, another drawback is that the candidate has to pay to take the test;  at the moment it's €100. This is always a problem. If the test is serious, it costs money. The more serious it is, the more it costs to administer.

[Cours vers le ô]

Bonjour à tous,

Je pense également que ce serait une très bonne idée.

Merci Laurence,

Véronique Léval

Formatrice indépendante en FLE

Approche Silent Way

Formatrice de formateurs

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[Laurence Howells]

Just to mention, we've now published English and French versions of the diagrams included in the document mentioned above on our website.  We're still working towards a paper we'd hope to get published, but there's a) more work to do on that and b) I think there might be a better way to present these progression diagrams.  So, in the meantime: a) we hope they'll be useful to people b) feedback please! c) we'll keep you updated!

https://silentway.online/2021/12/29/a-framework-for-students-progress/

[Laurence Howells]

And, in case you find it useful, Cedric Lefebvre and I just wrote an article about this which was just published on p 9 of 'Voices'.  

https://issuu.com/iatefl/docs/voices_287_digital?fr=sNjY3OTQ5MzY0Mjg

Best wishes

Laurence

[don cherry]

Just read the IATEFL article. Great work, guys! One sentence that really leaps off the page for me, one I've read and heard before, is the bit about keeping students heads UP and attentive rather than buried in a book. That is something that I have always felt was key to teaching language, and I always thought it was crazy to have classes where people were supposed to be learning a language but instead seemed to spend way too much energy figuring out how to use the textbook. It is a big part of why I was initially attracted to Silent Way. 

[Nicoleta Surdu]

Hi everyone,

I've just finished reading it as well and it couldn't have come at a better time. I've been interviewing adult learners for the past month for the upcoming autumn groups and it's so ... sad to see how stuck and unable they are to make use of the vocabulary they have. They view that "you have to know many words" has created such a twisted perception of what languages are. Very few realize that there must be more to it since they haven't been able to get to fluency in such a long time and they begin to wonder. However, the view most adult learners have, at least here in Romania,  is that "English is just like Romanian with different words". This is the result of overloading learners with a lot of vocabulary they don't know what to do with at the beginning of their learning journey. This is like putting the cart before the horse and expecting a smooth ride.

Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you for the article and I ended up spilling my frustration here a bit :)

I may have a local perspective here, but if we put things into a wider perspective, I think this is the first time in history when adults are faced with the necessity of speaking a foreign language as a means of professional (and personal) survival. I'm speaking about a mass phenomenon, not only in some fields or professions, but across industries. And what's more, over the past few years the requirement "to have English knowledge" has been widely replaced by "to be able to speak the language".   

[Roslyn Young]

Hi Nicoleta,

I've used the following sentences to make the point:

Plome the pleakful crotations ruggled the polanians ungleashabley in the rit.

Questions: 

s it in English? How do we know? what do we know about the situation? Who ruggled whom? What were the crotations like? How? When? Where? I then make students aware that the words they don't know were invented for the purpose. They don't exist in English. It's the 'little words' which allow you to know it's English. These words are the core, the heart, of the English language.

Here's the translation into French.

Tareque, les crotations altiènes ont rugglé les polaniens ingrésablement dans la rièse.

How do we know it's in French? The same way as for English. The nouns, verbs and adjectives (and some adverbs) have been invented to make the point. But we still know: how, when, where, why, by whom, to whom, etc this action took place.

You might like to give us a translation into Romanian!

Ros

[Laurence Howells]

Nicoleta

Can I steal your phrase "English is just like Romanian with different words" ? ... though I might make it even more fun as "Japanese is just like English with different words" Ha ha ha ha! ... Your phrase will be so useful as another way to make it obvious how ridiculous the theory that learning a language is just learning a LOT of words is!  

Laurence

[Nicoleta Surdu]

Thank you for this, Ros. Indeed, this is a powerful example to make the point.

I remember I heard a German speaker give a similar example for German :)

Thank you for the French version as well 👍

[Nicoleta Surdu]

Absolutely, Laurence. Please do!

Laurence, I'd like to share the article on social media platforms, would you by any chance have a link that would take the reader directly to the article, not to the magazine?

Maybe you could post it on silentway.online to have a "dedicated" link to it?

[Laurence Howells]

I don’t see why we shouldn’t have a pdf of just our bit on SilentWay.online … but I’ll check first.  I’ll let you know.

Laurence

Sent from my iPad

On 2 Sep 2022, at 11:31, Nicoleta Surdu <nicolet...@cursevo.ro> wrote:

Absolutely, Laurence. Please do!

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[Laurence Howells]

Nicoleta

It's now on our website.  There is a link from the page about the progression diagram ... or here's a direct link to our article at:

https://silentway.online/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Voices_287.pdf?x52374

Please share it with anyone you think might be interested!

Laurence