Making Progress in a Language
Friday, 23rd January 2009
When learning a language it can be useful to monitor your progress.
This gives you an opportunity to see how much you have learnt and how well you are progressing towards your goals. It can help also to motivate you to continue with your studies, and help you to find aspects of your studies that you’re struggling with. Once you’ve identified them, you can think of ways to get over those hurdles.
If one of your goals is to be able to engage in ordinary conversations in the language you’re learning (L2), you can discover how close you are to achieving this by finding some native speakers and trying to converse with them. If there are no native speakers of your L2 in your area, you can probably find some online via one of the numerous language exchange websites. If you find yourself struggling to say much, maybe you need to practise on your own more and firm up your knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary.
If one of your goals is to be able to read your L2 with ease, then you can test yourself by reading unfamiliar texts and seeing how much you can understand. You could also try translating the texts into your native language, or explaining their content to a friend who is unfamiliar with your L2.
Keeping a diary or blog is a good way to practise your L2 writing skills. When doing this it helps if you try to think in your L2 rather than thinking in your native language and translating. You can monitor whether your writing skills are improving by seeing how long it takes to write each entry, and by how many times you have to check words in a dictionary. On a blog you can also ask for feedback on your language use and mistakes.
You can check how well your listening skills are developing by listening to a variety of spoken materials – radio broadcasts, television programmes, songs, conversations, and so on. If you find that you can understand all or most of some types of spoken language, and struggle to understand others, you’ll know which ones to focus on.
Another way to monitor your progress is to take language proficiency exams. They give you a snapshot of your language skills and are useful when applying for jobs and university courses.
Tags: english, french, spanish, german, italian, progress, language-learning, level
Posted by Simon Ager under Making Progress,
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