Haha, I knew the day would come, lol.

Thanks, I fixed it.

“You want to say or write something but you can’t express yourself as good [WELL] as you’d like to.”

Thanks for your comment, Xiang.

It’s correct. The idea is that you mark what you DO understand so you can later see if you understand more. If I mark, say, 50% of a page as understood and two months later I mark 80% of the page as understood, it means I have progressed significantly even if I feel I haven’t.

It’s a way to loosely measure your progress and can be helpful to determine if you’re still learning.

Hope that makes sense,
Noel

Thank you very much for this article, which gives me a lot of good ideas about how to break through a plateau in language learning. There is one thing in your article that I don’t quite understand. When you talk about the ways to evaluate whether you’ve hit a plateau, you suggested the following:

“Read a short story or text and mark the words and sentences you understand. Don’t try to learn the content afterward. Next, leave the story alone for a while. Pick it up again once you feel you’ve hit a plateau. Do you understand much more than the last time you read this? You’re probably OK. If not, you’ve likely hit a plateau.”

I’m wondering whether you meant “Read a short story or text and mark the words and sentences you DO NOT understand”, which makes more sense to me. But if you mean as what you wrote, then what’s the rationale behind it?

Xiang from China

Hi Jan,

Thanks for your elaborated comment.

It looks good, although depending on their level you might want add some conversation practice to the mix.

I agree with you that writing is like thinking. Or, as I discuss in the article, like speaking, but slower and more deliberate. I think writing is a very underrated language-learning vehicle.

Thanks,
Noel

With very great interest, I have read your text on the language learning plateau.

Being a lecturer in English in an Antwerp college of Business and Trade (Karel de Grote-Hogeschool), I had to tackle some rather harsh remarks of my second-year students with the start of their second year training period. They fiercely complained about me and the training I had given them in their first year. “We have learned nothing” is what they kept saying. No need to tell you that these remarks cut sharply into my professional pride!

For you information: my first year training involves:
– listening to and summarizing current BBC news podcasts,
– listening and re-telling an English office soap in the form of a presentation (http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/general/englishatwork),
– listening, summarizing and presenting parts of a BBC website of news vocabulary (http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/webcast/tae_insight_archive.shtml),

In all their writing activities, they are provided with a selection of 10 words which they have to use in their writing (200 – 250 words) in order to make these words sink in. The reality is, however, that, while listening, they “wait” for these words to pop up, they “copy” the sentences in which these words appear and they think they have done a good job. In fact, they are turning themselves into self-declared “robots” which they do not like at all, but which, in my opinion, they only have themselves to blame for.

The same phenomenon is also noticeable in many presentations which, despite my efforts to have them work as visually as possible, often remain carefully prepared “paper language”, supported by the largely over-used PowerPoint bullet points.

Anyway, writing is a very essential part of my training because “writing”, if treated in the correct way, is, to my knowledge, a synonym of “thinking”.

Now, I would like to return to my starting point, the start of my second year training. The structure of the training remains. Only, the contents will be very different:
– Current podcasts
(e.g. http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/countingthecost) will keep track of “hot” business news,
– Management vocabulary will be trained on another website (https://www.mindtools.com) by doing quizzes, discussing outcomes and introducing management skills by presentations and discussions,
– looking for a suitable job opening in order to write a C.V. as well as a tailor-made covering letter resulting in a job interview,
– a final speech on their personal opinion about their English training.

Finally, I hope you have been given a clear picture of my activities and your personal opinion about my approach would be most welcome.

Best of regards,
Jan Cornelis
English Business Communication Lecturer
Karel de Grote-Hogeschool
Antwerp

Hi Luke,

Great to see you here again!

I think your “problem” is that reading is input and you need more output. Output is speaking and writing.

You shouldn’t stop reading, of course, but a bit of deliberate practice to break those basic patterns would probably make all the difference.

Use writing or speaking(to yourself), and express yourself in different ways than you normally would. If you don’t know how, use google. When you’ve found something, use it in your writing/speaking in different contexts. Make sure you repeat this exercise several times over the space of a month and chances are that you’ll start using this particular form of expressing yourself automatically.

If you think it’s a lot of work: it isn’t! I’m talking about coming up with a little story or something about yourself in which you use the expression a few times. You then note in your agenda when you’ll have to repeat the exercise. Just make sure you use a different story each time.

Noel