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If you're doing anything which requires learning a skill, it's important to understand how to work with your brain and not against it. There are many areas where this may be the case (like music and sport) but let's focus on improving your English as one particular skill.
Improving your English proficiency involves a combination of knowing what to do and then executing it. You achieve this by building muscle memory which is why you do lots of repetitions of different exercises. And it works better when you're stress free and relaxed.
However, if you have a deadline (your own or one that someone else has given you), the pressure increases and you're more likely to start feeling stressed. It's so easy to keep going and pushing yourself to try to fit in a little more practice or repetition. It's almost what we expect our behaviour should be in these cases but that can be detrimental to your progress.
It's really important to take breaks however stressed you are, and however close your deadline is.
Earlier this year, I was working with a client and helping her to prepare for an English proficiency exam. She had trouble with one particular question in the speaking section where a lot of information needed to be gathered then summarized in a concise response. In this question, she hesitated, paused to think, and struggled to gather her thoughts to speak spontaneously.
We practised strategies and techniques and, this is really important:
she knew WHAT to do but she still struggled.
We had a break of a couple of weeks because of various holidays and when we resumed lessons, we started practising this question again. My client was amazing! She was calm and focused. She spoke with no pauses or hesitations, and included just the right amount of information. Her performance was so much better than when we’d last looked at this question.
When we chatted afterwards, I asked her how she’d been practising. She said she’d repeated old questions and practised timing, the normal things she usually did for practice. But interestingly, she said that she hadn’t practiced this particular question at all in the last week. She'd been focusing on other speaking skills.
There are 2 important lessons to learn from this story:
You cannot force progress when you're building a skill. You might practise for weeks and think you’re making no progress when suddenly things click into place and everything just improves. This is totally normal.
Your brain does all sorts of background processing when you’re not actively focusing on building a skill. You have to give your brain a chance to do this background processing otherwise you won’t get better. You’ll just keep repeating the same old errors.
In the case of my client, she'd taken a break from the question that was causing her problems and had practised other skills instead. This allowed her brain to do its valuable background processing so when she returned to the question, she was better at it. Even though she was close to her deadline, by understanding this process and not panicking, she was able to able to complete it to a much higher standard.
So, the next time you’re frustrated about not making progress in English, remember you can do it, and you will do it. You just have to work with your brain and not against it.
Written by me, not AI, so I can be clear, precise and say exactly what I mean.
Header photo by Tetiana Zatsarynna on Unsplash