85% improvement in communicative competence after 20 minutes
Here's what happened
Time for another case study! I teach a low-beginner French student. She is working on her ability to communicate in free-flowing conversations with limited vocabulary. We had two separate conversations in class today. The first one lasted just over 15 minutes and the second one was for 20 minutes.
To track her progress, we counted the number of times she needed to use a translator in her conversations. Her stats were:
First conversation: The student had 20 speech turns in total. She didn’t need a translator to communicate her thoughts 7 times and did need one 13 times.
Second conversation: The student, again, had 20 speech turns in total. She saw an 85% improvement from the first conversation moving her ratio from 7:13 to 10:10.
How did this happen?
In short, I tackled the two missing pieces in most foreign language classes: metrics and psychology. Read more about that here.
Metrics: Tracking progress with data is often enough drive rapid progress. Think of it like this: if you want to lose weight, stepping on the scale every day might be all the motivation you need to do so. Furthermore, it provides real-time feedback on if you are moving in the right direction
Psychology: The student and I had a dialogue about how she could improve her performance. She said to me, “Maybe I should just use the translator as a last resort and really try to communicate without it.” As soon as she had that thought, everything changed and she saw an immediate 85% improvement. This is what I call a psychological unblock
I can’t wait to keep working with this student!
We’re first going to keep improving her communicative competence with her limited vocabulary. Next, we’ll likely work to improve her fluency, which I measure by counting the words spoken per minute.
Thanks for reading!
Azren
Calgary Language Nerds owner
https://azrenthelanguagenerd.com