Being able to stay motivated is a key challenge when learning a language, no matter how long you have been learning. Motivation is key for learners to retain information and have the ability to use their knowledge in practical situations. Some common challenges include boredom, feeling of no progression, busy schedule and many more. Below is a list of tips from Ace English to stay on track and keep your motivation high as you continue your English learning journey.
Set Clear, Achievable Goals
Setting goals is an important part of staying motivated so try to set long-term and short-term goals. Having a long-term goal will make sure that you have an end in sight and keep you feeling like you want to reach the end. Having short-term goals will help you stay on track to achieve your long-term goal and keep you feeling like you are achieving and progressing each week or each month. Make sure you break down your learning into manageable steps, this could mean daily targets, weekly targets or monthly targets. Try to keep these steps realistic and give yourself a reasonable amount of time to complete them. This will help you to not feel rushed and more likely to achieve your targets. Some examples of specific, manageable goals are; mastering a certain amount of words or phrases each week, listening to one podcast in English or watch one English film each week, master one grammar point each week, spend 15 mins a day on an English app or read an English article per day. Your specific targets should be related to your long-term goal and to keep you more motivated try to have different targets each week.
Celebrate Small Wins
Having short-term targets will help you to be able to celebrate the small wins and keep you wanting to win more. It is important to recognise the small progresses you make along the way because this is what keeps you going each week, wanting to learn more and widen your knowledge. It doesn't matter how small these wins are, the importance is to recognise the progress made and the more this happens the more you know. After achieving targets and milestones set, rewarding yourself is important. This can be small and cost nothing, but rewarding yourself can give you extra motivation and boost your confidence to keep going with the goals set.
Incorporate English into Your Daily Life
To keep motivation high it is important to try to integrate English into everyday life. This could be watching a movie or tv show or listening to music or a podcast. Incorporating English into daily life will soon become a part of your routine and will become natural to you. An important part of learning and retaining a language is to use it often in order to not forget It. Using online apps or doing online grammar exercises each day can help with consolidating your learning. All you need to do is spend an average of 30minutes each day on English (the length of a tv show/podcast) in order to stay consistent, achieve your targets and keep motivated.
Find a tutor
There are many benefits to learning with others, it can keep you accountable, help you stay motivated and provide extra support. Finding a tutor can help keep you on track with learning as well as offering opportunities to practise conversations, vocabulary and grammar. Having a tutor with Ace English brings an added benefit of practising English using authentic materials to help you with real life situations. You can book a lesson with a highly experienced native British Ace English tutor here.
Use Diverse Learning Resources
To stay motivated, it's important to vary study materials to keep learning interesting and fun. Using a mixture of resources at your own pace can help to keep you on track and achieve goals. These different resources can include, books, tv shows, films, music, podcasts, language apps, online grammar/game sites, online news articles, or newspapers/magazines. These can be a fun and entertaining way to learn but can also reinforce learning. Regularly reinforcing learning in different formats can keep motivation high and less boring.
Embrace Mistakes as Part of the Learning Process
Making mistakes is a part of learning a language and the best way to not let it become a setback and lose motivation, is to look at mistakes in a positive way. Making mistakes is an important process in order to help with using correct language in the future. This can be a particular benefit with having a tutor or a study partner to point out mistakes and encourage accurate language. Making mistakes is natural and normal, no one learning a new language has ever been perfect during their journey, the important thing is learning from these errors and making notes to reinforce correct use. Having a positive mindset about mistakes will help keep you motivated throughout your learning English journey.
Track Your Progress
Tracking progress is key to knowing where you are in your journey. Keeping a journal or using an online app to track your current language level will help you feel motivated to reach the next level. Seeing progress over time is a great way to stay motivated for a long period of time and gives a psychological benefit when passing tests or doing something new for the first time during the journey. As you see progress it is time to adjust targets and goals to to take your progress to the next level. When using online tests to monitor progress, it is important to not do these too often. Doing tests each week will not show the progress accurately and therefore discourage learning. Tests should be done every 3-4 months at least, in order to give a reasonable amount of time for you to continue your progression, and give you more motivation to continue your learning journey.
Following these tips to stay motivated will help you stay on track and succeed in learning English. For more tips and tricks to help you learn English, visit us at www.aceenglish.co.uk
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