How To Set Goals For Learning English
Setting goals is an essential part of learning a language. Your goals will help give a structure to your learning, and motivate you to work harder.
However, there are some key points to bear in mind when creating your language learning goals, because doing this in the wrong way could actually do more harm than good.
What are realistic goals?
When learning English, it is very easy to just have the goal of "become fluent".
Where this is a good goal overall, it is firstly likely to take a long time, and secondly could be quite difficult to measure. This can result in you feeling like you are not making progress, which will ultimately have an impact on your confidence.
A much more practical approach would be to set small goals that act as little steps to your main goal. This way you can see the progress of your fluency
Examples Of Realistic Goals For Learning English
So here are some examples of smaller goals that could ultimately lead to a bigger, overall goal:
- Learn, and be able to confidently use, 8 new phrasal verbs every week for a month.
- Have a conversation/discussion about a topic you have never spoken about before in English.
- Learn to read a paragraph with the correct intonation, and record your progress.
As you can see, these goals are much easier to measure, which not only makes it easier to monitor your progress, but also enables you to celebrate your success!
That has to be a win win situation!
Amy Smith