Does progress in English slow as you get more advanced?

Ian Wood
A young woman sat in a library with headphones around her neck reading a book
Reading time: 4 minutes

Why does progression seem to slow down as an English learner moves from beginner to more advanced skills?

The journey of learning English

When presenting at ELT conferences, I often ask the audience – typically teachers and school administrators – “When you left home today, to start your journey here, did you know where you were going?” The audience invariably responds with a laugh and says yes, of course. I then ask, “Did you know roughly when you would arrive at your destination?” Again the answer is, of course, yes. “But what about your students on their English learning journey? Can they say the same?” At this point, the laughter stops.

All too often English learners find themselves without a clear picture of the journey they are embarking on and the steps they will need to take to achieve their goals. We all share a fundamental need for orientation, and in a world of mobile phone GPS we take it for granted. Questions such as: Where am I? Where am I going? When will I get there? are answered instantly at the touch of a screen. If you’re driving along a motorway, you get a mileage sign every three miles.

When they stop appearing regularly we soon feel uneasy. How often do English language learners see mileage signs counting down to their learning goal? Do they even have a specific goal?

Am I there yet?

The key thing about GPS is that it’s very precise. You can see your start point, where you are heading and tell, to the mile or kilometer, how long your journey will be. You can also get an estimated time of arrival to the minute. As Mike Mayor mentioned in his post about what it means to be fluent, the same can’t be said for understanding and measuring English proficiency. For several decades, the ELL industry got by with the terms ‘beginner’, ‘elementary’, ‘pre-intermediate’ and ‘advanced’ – even though there was no definition of what they meant, where they started and where they ended.

The CEFR has become widely accepted as a measure of English proficiency, bringing an element of shared understanding of what it means to be at a particular level in English. However, the wide bands that make up the CEFR can result in a situation where learners start a course of study as B1 and, when they end the course, they are still within the B1 band. That doesn’t necessarily mean that their English skills haven’t improved – they might have developed substantially – but it’s just that the measurement system isn’t granular enough to pick up these improvements in proficiency.

So here’s the first weakness in our English language GPS and one that’s well on the way to being remedied with the Global Scale of English (GSE). Because the GSE measures proficiency on a 10-90 scale across each of the four skills, students using assessment tools reporting on the GSE are able to see incremental progress in their skills even within a CEFR level. So we have the map for an English language GPS to be able to track location and plot the journey to the end goal.

‘The intermediate plateau’

When it comes to pinpointing how long it’s going to take to reach that goal, we need to factor in the fact that the amount of effort it takes to improve your English increases as you become more proficient. Although the bands in the CEFR are approximately the same width, the law of diminishing returns means that the better your English is to begin with, the harder it is to make further progress – and the harder it is to feel that progress is being made.

That’s why many an English language-learning journey gets abandoned on the intermediate plateau. With no sense of progression or a tangible, achievable goal on the horizon, the learner can become disoriented and demoralised.

To draw another travel analogy, when you climb 100 meters up a mountain at 5,000 meters above sea level the effort required is greater than when you climb 100 meters of gentle slope down in the foothills. It’s exactly the same 100 meter distance, it’s just that those hundred 100 meters require progressively more effort the higher up you are, and the steeper the slope. So, how do we keep learners motivated as they pass through the intermediate plateau?

Education, effort and motivation

We have a number of tools available to keep learners on track as they start to experience the law of diminishing returns. We can show every bit of progress they are making using tools that capture incremental improvements in ability. We can also provide new content that challenges the learner in a way that’s realistic.

Setting unrealistic expectations and promising outcomes that aren’t deliverable is hugely demotivating for the learner. It also has a negative impact on teachers – it’s hard to feel job satisfaction when your students are feeling increasingly frustrated by their apparent lack of progress.

Big data is providing a growing bank of information. In the long term this will deliver a much more precise estimate of effort required to reach higher levels of proficiency, even down to a recommendation of the hours required to go from A to B and how those hours are best invested. That way, learners and teachers alike would be able to see where they are now, where they want to be and a path to get there. It’s a fully functioning English language learning GPS system, if you like.

Learn about the Global Scale of English learning objectives

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    How the GSE can help teachers personalize activities

    By Leonor Corradi

    Reading time: 4.5 minutes

    Teaching is an art form that thrives on adaptation and personalization. When dealing with language instruction, ensuring that each student is engaged and effectively learning is of paramount importance. In my experience as a teacher, I have learned that we should always teach our students rather than the coursebook or the syllabus. I think most teachers would agree with this.

    However, it may be challenging to adapt activities to cater to our learners’ needs. What does personalizing an activity mean? How can we make it more accessible to our English learners? One would think that making the answers more obvious can be the way to go. Yet, this does not really help students learn and make progress. That's where the Global Scale of English (GSE) comes in as a valuable tool for personalizing teaching activities.

    The essence of personalized learning

    Personalizing an activity in language teaching does not simply mean making the responses more obvious. Instead, it's about tailoring the exercise to elevate the student's learning experience and potential for progress. This demands an insightful approach during the preparation phase of any given lesson.

    Utilizing the GSE in language teaching

    Let’s analyze this listening activity at A2 level for a group of adults:

    Audio script example:

    Emma: Are you working on the Media project?

    Vic: Yes. I may start working on a new project in a couple of weeks, but for now I’m writing the objectives for Media. Why?

    Emma: Well, Adam wants to see the photos for the project. He needs them for the ads.

    Vic: Oh, they’ll be ready next week. OK?

    Emma: Awesome! Thanks. Any plans for the weekend?

    Vic: Well, I have to work on Saturday. We’re taking the Media pictures in the morning, but we’re just going to have fun at the beach in the afternoon.

    Emma: Nice!

    Vic: What about you? What are you doing this weekend?

    Emma: I’m going to a concert on Sunday at 3 pm.

    Vic: That sounds fun!

    Listen and write T (true) or F (false)

    1. Vic is working on a new project.

    2. Vic is working on Saturday morning.

    3. Emma is going to a concert on Sunday evening.

    GSE Descriptors

    Upon dissecting this example by the GSE descriptors, we can identify the learning objectives that align with an A2 level:

    • Can identify simple information in a short video, provided that the visual supports this information and the delivery is slow and clear. (GSE 30)

    • Can identify basic factual information in short, simple dialogues or narratives on familiar everyday topics, if spoken slowly and clearly. (GSE 32)

    • Can understand the main information in short, simple dialogues about familiar activities, if spoken slowly and clearly.(GSE 33)

    • Can identify key information (e.g., places, times) from short audio recordings if spoken slowly and clearly. (GSE 33)

    We know that learners should be given a global task first for overall listening, which is also one of the communicative objectives in the Global Scale of English:

  • A teacher helping a student at a table

    The Global Scale of English and planning: A perfect partnership

    By Leonor Corradi

    As a teacher, I realized that planning had become an 'automatic pilot' routine from which I did not learn much. Like many others, I thought scales such as the Global Scale of English (GSE) or the Common European Framework of Reference are just that; references that are beyond the realities of their lessons.

    However, I've seen that the GSE is a very powerful resource to help us at the level of planning.

    If you're using a coursebook you may have noticed that, after completing one of the books in the series, students move up one level, such as from elementary to pre-intermediate or from intermediate to upper-intermediate.

    We all understand what it means to be an elementary or intermediate student. These levels are usually defined in terms of structures – conditional sentences, passive voice, and tenses – Simple Past, Future Continuous, etc.

    But why do students want to learn English? Using it means being able to listen or read and understand, interact with others, and communicate in writing. Even if it is parents who enroll their children in language institutes, what they want is for them to use the language. We can see a mismatch between how levels are defined and students' aims to study English.

    Here's how the GSE can help English language teachers

    First, you need the right scale for your group – Pre-primary, Young Learners, Adults, Professionals or Academic, which can be downloaded at:

    /languages/why-pearson/the-global-scale-of-english/resources.html

    Focus on your students' level. There you will see all the learning objectives that students need to achieve to complete the level at which they are and move on in their learning journey.

    What are learning objectives?They are can-do statements that clearly describe what students are expected to achieve as the result of instruction. In other words, these objectives guide teachers in our planning to help students learn.

    When we plan our lessons, rather than working at lesson level only, we should reflect on how the activities proposed are referenced against the learning objectives of the level. We may see that some activities need some adapting in order to focus on the selected learning outcomes.

    At the level of planning as well, I also use the GSE to analyze the activities proposed in the materials I am using. Let me tell you what I do. Let's take listening, for instance. You may use the downloaded scales or the Teacher Toolkit that the GSE provides. Let's run through how this works.