I just made a fluency plan for a French learner
It was eye-opening!
I learned something important just now.
I was doing an assessment with an advanced French student. I have a general idea of her level since I've taught her before, but I have never done a formal assessment. Normally I do oral assessments, not written ones. However, I have been improving upon my assessment procedures and thought there'd be value in assessing grammar, particularly with an advanced student, in writing.
So I did that today for the first time.
It was incredibly useful!
The written assessment, paired with an oral one, gave me a much more detailed look at her grammatical abilities. For example, her grammar is 99% correct when she speaks, but when testing her tenses with a written test her score dropped to 81%. That showed me that she is able to maintain excellent grammar when speaking by mostly using grammar she knows well.
The other benefit of the written test was that I was able to see a pattern in her errors. It would have been harder to find that pattern had I used my typical oral test. The pattern behind her errors was as clear as day: she is skilled with regular verbs, but struggles with irregular verbs.
This student wants to speak French at a near-native level.
She is advanced now. I have one small piece of the assessment remaining with her, but from what I can tell thus far her future classes would be focused on:
Irregular verb drills
Lots of reading and listening
The reading and listening would, in part, help with grammar, but would be more for vocabulary purposes. That is her biggest gap to reaching a very advanced level. Based on the assessment, she would need to basically double her current vocabulary size. This is normal for someone at her level.
Her pronunciation score was 95%.
She pronounces everything very clearly, but does not sound like a native speaker. This student said she would like to sound near-native. Therefore, once her vocabulary has increased and the grammar gaps are reduced, the next focus would be on mimicry-based exercises for pronunciation purposes.
All of this would take ~12 months (maybe less).
In my 2 years of research I have found that almost everyone can level up within 1 year of part-time study (about 30 min a day). This is significantly faster than the progress most people experience.
I think the reason is that we are the first, at least to my knowledge, to use evidence-based teaching. We try to get data about how you speak and use it to make decisions on how to proceed. Therefore, study time is well-spent. It’s never wasted and you’re being efficient.
I have so much yet to learn.
The deeper I get into this Guaranteed Fluency project, I feel simultaneously more confident and less confident. My tutors and I are doing better work than ever before, and yet we still keep making so many mistakes.
The journey continues!
Thanks for reading 😊
Azren
Calgary Language Nerds owner
https://azrenthelanguagenerd.com