So...how fluent are you?
These are some of the measures we use to determine fluency
Most language learners have, at some point, taken lessons. However, all the language teachers I’ve ever met in my life fail to do three things:
Set clear goals with students
Agree on how to measure progress
Teach in a way that always makes students measurably improve
I realized this after working with a personal trainer.
When I asked him how I can measure my fitness progress, he had concrete answers. He told me how to set, measure, and improve various aspects of my health. It was so straightforward. No guesswork at all. I was blown away!
He inspired me to create the same seamless experience for language learners.
After working with my trainer, I began creating simple proficiency criteria that correlate to real-world communication ability. Here are the most common ones:
Conversation. It’s measured by the number of minutes you can hold a conversation about the four most common day-to-day conversation topics (background, daily life, interests, and work). A good score is 30 minutes.
Fluency. It’s measured by your speech rate (i.e., the average number of words you say per minute). My team and I are trying to find the minimum score that is needed for your speech to be labeled as “fluent.” From our research, native speakers’ speech rate is 110 words per minute, on the lower end. Our current guess is that 75 words per minute is the minimum for a non-native speaker to sound natural. More testing is still required.
Grammar. It’s measured by subtracting the number of grammatical errors you make from the number of words spoken and then getting a percentage. For example, if you speak at 100 words per minute, hold a 5-minute conversation, and make 100 grammar mistakes, your accuracy would be 400/500 = 80% (100 words x 5 minutes minus 100 errors divided by a total of 500 words spoken)
Communicative competence. This is is an indication how how well you can communicate despite a limited vocabulary. It’s measured as a ratio between how often you need a translator during a conversation vs how often you do not.
At the Calgary Language Nerds, we teach with strategies that target each category.
That way, you know precisely what steps you need to take to quickly boost up your level in a certain category. It’s not uncommon for students to see a 100% improvement in a certain category within just a few lessons. I could almost go as far as to say it’s the norm, though I won’t make that claim definitively until I’ve seen such results repeated with hundreds of people for each category.
For full transparency, we are still developing and refining the teaching methods to make learning a 100% seamless experience. We’re not there yet.
However, what we have put together so far leads to waaaaaaaayyyy faster progress than anything else I have ever seen in 14+ years of learning languages and 8 years of teaching them.
It’s exciting and rewarding to have created something truly unique :)
Thanks for reading!
Azren
Calgary Language Nerds owner
https://azrenthelanguagenerd.com