Do You Speak A Second Language?

It's basically their play to generate direct revenue from learners - providing a quasi-formal certificate to you if you pay $49 and pass a test. It has started to take off in the US with universities, apparently.

They do it with English, definitely, and possibly other languages but i'm not entirely sure how extensive it is yet. It seems to be the direction they're going in, though.

Ugh

In theory, it might not be so bad. There would be a value in having something you can put on a CV if you are learning a language that is hard to formally certify in other ways. If they introduced one for Japanese, for example, it would be much more convenient than the JLPT.

The risk with English is that it's already a market that is well catered-to and a cheap-and-cheerful cash-grab has the potential to drive down standards in the wider industry, but that is probably a niche concern.

The English one is apparently not very good psychometrically. I am going to try it out next week if i get the time.

They are going to have to monetise learners somehow if they're going to grow but it sounds like they have been trying / failing with a few different ideas over the last couple of years.

Right. Japanese would be interesting. This guy doesn't like the English test: https://eltjam.com/deconstructing-the-duolingo-english-test-det/

Yep, the critical paper cited in that review trashes the test.

And yet - if you want to go to Yale, it's accepted as an alternative to one of the big three so they must be persuasive!

Yes, saw my alma mater was right up there. What are the big three?

IELTS / TOEFL / PTE Academic.

All three or four hours long vs Duolingo's 30 minutes.

Seems like the academic equivalent of the much-maligned Fluency Shield.

From a purely linguistic perspective, the idea of aptitude testing a language (any language) induces a kind of philosophical vertigo. I mean obviously you need something to place students on a track that helps them the most, but thinking about it induces a nice kind of ASMR tingly feeling.

Tbh, if you can broadly come up with a framework for what it means to teach and learn English you can test against that framework fairly easily until you get to discussion of what is meant by 'fluency' and the wheels fall off.

The fuzziness / appropriacy / biases of the underlying framework is the dizzying bit imo but that extends a lot further than assessment.

Yeah, it's more about what gradations of fluency might be that's dizzying... like some kind of lenticular map that is legible at some angles and impenetrable from others.

Yep, and I think the wild proliferation of scales (CES, GSE, IELTS bands, different TOEFL scales, etc), each with their own contradictory claims of alignment to the Common European Framework of Reference, points to that.

It is interesting that one of the fashionable topics at a lot of recent applied linguistics conferences has been assessment literacy, though - lifting the hood on a lot of these issues and going in to the limitations of testing as well as the mechanics.

finally? accepting that testing has limitations?!?!!? that's good to hear

I stumped up my $49 this morning and took the test. It's absolutely abysmal - the review linked upthread is generous, if anything. You can knock it off in 15 minutes and more than half the test is just identifying real / fake words which, even before you get to the question of how a second-language learner is meant to know for sure that a particular combination of letters doesn't exist in a 200,000-word corpus, is rendered meaningless by the fact that the audio is completely indistinct.

i'm shocked (not really)
sorry you wasted your $49 :(

It is ok. I will expense it!

I am looking forward to getting my score on Saturday.

hahaha, now I want to try! I could probably expense it too.

Think I am just going to stick with screen grabs of my Fluency Shields.

xp, ILX-mail me if you would like to have a go at a different (and hopefully more robust) computer-based test.
.

For (learners of) English?

Yep.

Will you be reviewing your experience in any way, SV, or was it just to satisfy your own curiosity?

I'm following this closely, also because my native minority language consists of just 6,000 speakers right now and is slowly declining. There's a digital course set up last year. I don't think it's very good, but then it's so so hard to get it right imo.

(^^ probably better for a true linguistics/language thread)

I can't really publish anything as I work for a competitor so it was more to get a sense of their approach and how it differs from others.

I should say that I like Duolingo as a fun learning platform - with some caveats. This just feels like overreach.

^this

Ah I see.

It does feel like overreach, though it seems like a logical next step, to take it from 'fun' to something more meaningful in a practical way. My gut says they've a long way to go yet, but I do commend them for trying.

xp

What is your native minority language, LBI?
Are you interested in feedback from native English speakers, SV?

It's B1ldts. It's listed as a dialect, sadly. Linguists have proven it to be a language (there's English reports about that online but I'd have to look for them), but the government needs to formally acknowledge it as such and turned down a request last year (it's all about money, it's cynical).

It's not true that I did nothing but use duolingo to learn French---I'd been fumbling with dictionaries and automated translators in order to read and sorta kinda write-ish French for years, and I was already competent in Spanish. But I'd never tried to learn to speak nor grasp any of the grammar until duolingo. Plus I was bold---after three months of heavy daily duolingo use, during which I moved to France for what was at the time just a one year fellowship, I elected to give my first public presentation of the year in French. My friend @ndr3w G31m@n had given a talk in French here the year before, bc he was like wtf sounds like a fun challenge, and I wasn't gonna be shown up by him! After that with daily interactions in French & lots of professional emails in French I reached a productive level quickly.

Now I need to test at B1 level for my citizenship portfolio here. I took an online one and got C1+ but I need an "official" one.

The data science guy is your friend?

It's listed as a dialect, sadly. Linguists have proven it to be a language

Do linguists regard this as a real distinction?

your friend
Okay, I get it. I actually exchanged emails with him once, about a completely unrelated topic.

No we and our families occasionally hung out when we were both in visiting positions in Paris a few years ago

Are you interested in feedback from native English speakers, SV?

It's more if anyone wanted to do it out of interest / a perverse sense of fun, tbh. This one has been road tested for years.

We do feedback sessions / field tests with native English speakers for new products though (with some form of compensation) so I will bear the ILX linguistics cru in mind if that comes up.

Do linguists regard this as a real distinction?

Linguists would probably say language is more accurately nothing but dialects, and the lines you draw to divide up all those dialects into languages have no objective reference... they are always drawn with respect to some purpose, not always a linguistic one. Linguists define language families based on linguistic features of the dialects (sound inventories, syntax, lexicon) because they're interested in how language works and changes. But people define languages with respect to stuff like establishing or maintaining territory, identity, community, gaining (or withholding) government funding, etc.

It's sometimes hard to grasp since the folk beliefs about what language is are different from how linguists think of language. I'd say people (implicitly, mostly) think of a language as something that exists outside of the mind and each speaker is an instance of the language who uses it with varying degrees of skill or corruption. But a linguist thinks of language as a fiction that is useful for talking about an aggregate of dialects, and the dialects themselves are aggregates of idiolects, each crafted by one person from birth. Which gives a better foundation for envisioning how messy the reality of a language/dialect distinction is. English speakers have a tidy conception of the difference, since English dialects don't vary that much and the leap to other languages crosses a big and obvious gap. But it's a lot more common for a region to have a bunch of dialects with a continuum of small differences and it's not easy to say what "language" they are all part of. Like you have language A, B, C, D, and E and while speakers A and B can understand one another, and B, C, and D can, and D and E can... but A and E can't. Are these dialects of language A, C, or E?

emailed you SV!

f hazel you're gonna wind up doing so much free education its :)

oops that was supposed to say itt
in this thread
haha!

Totally agree with LL, loved reading that Hazel

the folk beliefs
accurate AND charitable choice of words

Somewhat hesitant to reveal to LBI that on a recent vacation I dipped into the DL course of what I presume is his majority language.

Ha, echt? Leuk! How far did you come? Was it difficult for you?

So far just past the first checkpoint. How would you feel if I told I am enjoying it and not finding it especially difficult?

I'd feel great :) That's very good to hear. Are you planning on using it in any other context than racking up DL points? Do you have friends you could speak it with?

I wish

Well, did meet some Brazilians in the neighborhood recently, one of whom is half-Dutch and works for the Consulate, I think. Don't know if I will run into anytime soon, but always good to be prepared, I guess.

Actually already have a question for you. So "een tweeling" is a *pair* of twins? And also one single twin? And you can just tell by context which one you mean, with the first case being the default, or...

Also seems to me that "children" can be translated as "kinderen" but also "kids," but singular is only "kinder," no "kid" afaik.

Sorry singular just "kind" like, um, some other language.

"Een tweeling" is a pair of two people who are twins. It can never be one person of a two people who form twins. You do say 'mijn tweelingbroer' (my twin-brother), but you can't say "ik ben een tweeling" (I'm a tweeling), because that would literally mean you are two persons. Rather, you are part of a "tweeling". If that makes sense.

Children is 'kinderen', not 'kids' (though loads of Dutch ppl do say kids, taking it from English). Singular is 'kind'.

Perfect sense. Thanks!