If you haven’t set yourself clear and SMART goals, you can’t possibly evaluate your progress accurately. You can probably say that you ‘feel’ that you’ve improved your speaking skills, or you ‘think’ you know more vocabulary than you did last month.
That’s not enough, though!
Evaluation is not just about congratulating yourself on your progress. It’s also about figuring out what went wrong and how you can fix it next time round. If you don’t evaluate and dig deeper, you risk making the same mistakes again and stalling your progress.
How to fix it:
Learning a language is a journey. Imagine you’re going through a desert. It’s big and hot, and you’re tired and disoriented. Getting to the other side is not as easy as it seemed. How can you motivate yourself to carry on and make your journey easier?
One thing you can do is stop and evaluate where you are in relation to your goal. The other is look behind you to see the enormous distance you’ve already walked. Say well done to yourself!
Now, is there anything you could have done differently to make your journey quicker and less stressful? Perhaps make fewer but longer stops?
Reflecting on your learning process is a very important element of learning a language effectively. What worked last month? What didn’t? What are you going to do differently this month? Was your goal too ambitious or not ambitious enough? Evaluate it and you’ll move on faster!
