The hours problem

I'm running lots of calculations these days, you might notice. Some of that is driven by projects I'm working on, some of it is me being curious. I'm also back into reading a lot more SLA literature than in recent years.

You might be aware there are some guidelines on how many guided hours one needs to reach certain CEFR proficiency levels. For English it runs something like: A1 - 100, A2 - 200, B1 - 400, B2 - 600, C1 - 800, C2 - 1000-1200. (You might be aware of the FSI hours guide, which has never seen much verification, but it puts the hours for truly difficult languages up to around 2,200 for category 4, which is where I suspect Old Irish would end up.).

Guided hours means under immediate guidance or supervision from an instructor. So this hour count doesn't include independent study hours which are more difficult to judge. Those hours also vary slightly based on language.

There's another article I often come back to on this topic, which is Geortler, Kraemer, Schenker, 'Setting Evidence-Based Language Goals', Foreign Language Annals Vol 49, Is 3, pp 434-454, 2016. They were looking at setting benchmarks and outcomes for the German program at MSU, but their research both looks at some of this data, and puts it into the context of a university language program.

I was intrigued, reading Felici's thesis, by the comments on p134, of AVN allocating 150 contact hours for Familia Romana, and Polis Institute 120 hours to their first book. If you've seen Polis Book 1, you'll know it doesn't cover that much grammar, and there are 2 follow-on volumes. Familia Romana does cover a lot, grammar wise, and a lot of text.

By contrast, I cover all of 2-volumes of Athenaze in 60 contact hours, and all of Familia Romana in 40 hours. Neither feels truly sufficient, and I am aware both that (i) I'm relying on students putting in a significant amount of independent work to make the most of class time, (ii) the level of oral proficiency that I can expect from students after that introductory sequence ought to be relatively low.

I am not entirely sure what alternative there is in this kind of context though. Nobody except full-time students can really dedicate the time required to get a lot of contact hours, and thus exposure to living language, to develop oral proficiency to a decent level in a shorter amount of time. There are limits to what time people can devote to a language, short of making it a priority. And whether one does or not, it all requires not only time, but money.

Felici discusses his own experience with a traditional sequence of Old Irish - 100 contact hours of 4 semesters, barely enough to cover the grammar and morphosyntax itself. I think Ancient Greek begins to look easy by comparison, and Latin even more so. But none of this obviates the need for time spent in the language.

150 or 120 hours with Familia Romana or Polis book 1 is still, by the way, only really enough to probably get you to A1 or a bit beyond on the CEFR scale. If you do 120 hours as an intensive, that's 6hrs/day, 5d/week, 4-weeks. If you start to multiply that by the proficiency levels, we are talking months of full-time language study to get to the higher levels. Alternatively, at 2 hours a week, 48 weeks a year, you could get to 1000 hours in 10.4 years.

I think this kind of calculation is useful, but not that useful. Because we mostly aren't doing this kind of thing to this extent. And although 'C2 Ancient Greek' is one of my personal goals, you don't have to get to superior mastery of a language to read and enjoy Ancient Greek literature broadly. Honestly, getting students to B1 and maybe B2 will serve most people's needs. It's still just a lot of hours.

As I reflect on different materials I am developing and my own practice as a language learner and what might be possible as a facilitator of others' language learning, I think part of this must be finding ways to help learners' independent hours be better bang-for-buck. So, as an instructor I want to ask myself, "what is best practice for facilitating language acquisition during live instructor-led hours?" but as a guide and resource creator for others, "what is best practice for language learners to do on their own outside and apart from instructor-led hours?"