The question our foreign language department is most often asked by potential students: ‘if I come for a 10 week course will I be fluent?’

Now, that might seem like a funny question if you know anything about languages and learning languages but there is a serious side to it – so let’s look at what it could possibly mean! If someone studies a course for 20 hours from a beginner’s level they will cover a certain number of things -  some basic vocabulary, greetings, some simple question and answers, describing things, numbers, buying things in shops and so on. They will begin to learn how to talk about the past and the future. 

The issue of how much you can learn in a given period or a set number of hours is really a complicated one. Think back to school and how much you learned in a classroom the first time you learned a foreign language – 2 hours a week for a term is about the same as one of our courses. At the end of one term I really bet you wouldn’t have learned much at all but then consider how different your situation is now: if you come to study at UIC you are an adult, you are motivated, you are in a small class (average10) with other motivated adults, you have an enthusiastic native speaker teaching you and you have a syllabus which is communicative – all pretty much the opposites of what happened at school … (remember those huge classes of disinterested children and a teacher who may not have known much of the language?)

Of course as well as what we can offer you there are also all sorts of personal factors to take into account as well – are you good at learning languages, have you got a good memory? have you got good pronunciation? what is your motivation for learning a language?

So let’s have a look at what it might mean to be fluent? Fluent to do what would be a good place to start! The CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) sets out a framework where you can find descriptions about the different competencies you would be expected to have to survive at different levels. These range form level A1 (Beginner) all the way up to C2 which is approximating a native speaker. So, to go back and try to answer our question about being fluent in a language – if we set the level at the lowest we might describe as fluent – level B2 – we would expect someone at this level to be able to:

Listening & Speaking: can follow or give a talk on a familiar topic or keep up a conversation on a fairly wide range of topics

Reading: Can scan texts for relevant information and understand detailed instructions or advice

Writing: Can make notes while someone is talking or write a letter including non-standard requests

This is a level also typically described as Intermediate and we would expect this to take something like 9 months of fulltime study for an adult. There has been a recent development  in extreme exchanges – see this article in the Independent where children go to live with a partner in another country for 6 months at the age of 10 – and do tend to come back properly fluent but then you have to remember they re 10 years old and living in another country with no access to their own language! That’s a bit different to coming to classes once a week in London.
So although we can teach you a lot more than you expect (especially if you’re comparing it to your school experience) I’m sorry to say you’re not going to get fluent in 10 weeks. But don’t let that stop you coming to see – get in touch with us at UIC and see how we can help you.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 at 10:08 am and is filed under Foreign Languages, UIC London. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.