Last year, I spent about 6 months trying to improve upon the effectiveness of the classes at my business.
More specifically, I wanted to be able to guarantee fluency. I would love to be able to say something like, “90% of people who pay for classes with the Calgary Language Nerds reach a low-intermediate level of fluency in 1 year and an additional year for an upper-intermediate level.
I took a couple months off from working on this project and recently resumed it.
As a part of this project, tonight I was working on my business’ ability to measure and communicate progress with students.
It occurred to me while doing this that “listening comprehension” is too broad of a category. I’m wondering if it should actually be split into at least three sub-categories.
Phonemic awareness. How good are you at identifying sounds in another language? For example, could you hear a sentence and be able to spell it with ease, even if it were filled with unfamiliar words? If not, you likely have low phonemic awareness and struggle with listening comprehension.
Vocabulary. This is straightforward to understand. If someone uses a whole bunch of words you don’t know, obviously you are going to have a hard time understanding.
Grammar. Knowing words is often not enough. You need to understand what they mean when they’re put together. A lack of implicit or explicit grammatical understanding can definitely hinder one’s listening comprehension ability.
Dig under the surface.
You’re not just “bad at listening” or “good at listening.” It’s more nuanced than that. You instead have a good (or poor) grasp of phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and/or grammar.
Contact me if you’d like to speak on Zoom to assess your phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and/or grammar.
Literally after hitting “post” on this article, I’ll be continuing to work on my business’ assessment process for each of those skills. I’m sure I’ll have some insights and will be happy to have some guinea pigs to test my insights on, haha.
During the Zoom call I’d also be happy to share any tips I have for you to improve upon those three skills.
I would love to reach upper intermediate level.