Hello. I'm Julian Northbrook from doingenglish.com. One of the big
questions that my clients and my MEFA students ask me when they first join the course or join
one of my programs is, "Julian, what is a good way to measure my proficiency and
my progress in English?" And it's a great question, but the problem is, is measuring
your proficiency in English once you reach the high beginner intermediate stage and beyond,
I don't really think words like beginner and intermediate, advanced are actually that useful,
but you get what I mean. Once you can reach that stage, measuring your proficiency in
English is notoriously difficult to the extent where my biggest advice is don't.
Now, there are ways that we can measure efficiency in English. And I do teach those ways in my MEFA
course and elsewhere, but for most people most of the time, the main advice that I'm going to give
to you is forget about your proficiency. Forget about measuring how good you are at English,
and instead measure the process of improving. On the basis that you are doing the right things
to improve your English, you're learning the right things, you're using a method that works,
and you are doing the things that are going to actually help you to improve. Well,
then it's a simple case of doing more of that. And the more you do of it,
the more you're going to improve. Therefore, measure actions taken, things done in order to
improve your English. Measure whether you sit down to do some studying every single day. Measure how
much time you've spent on English, doing different aspects of the English learning process each day.
And that is going to give you a much, much, much clearer, much better idea of your progress than
trying to measure your proficiency. Because again, it's just notoriously it's difficult to do. Now,
you might be thinking, "Well, surely I can just take tests. That's a great way to do it." And no,
it's not really. Tests actually don't really measure your proficiency at all. They actually
measure how good you are at English based on the criteria of the test. A high score
on TOEIC doesn't really mean anything other than you've got a high score in TOEIC. I had
a client once who got a perfect score on TOEIC and he was pretty rubbish at speaking. He had
very high grammatical knowledge, high level of vocabulary and knew the rules of the game,
and therefore he was able to get a very, very high score on TOEIC. It's the same with IELTS, TOEFL,
all the tests are exactly the same. They don't really measure what you think they are measuring.
They measure your English based on a set of criteria laid out by the test. Another
example is I know somebody in the UK who actually teaches IELTS to British people. When they want
to immigrate to Australia and get a residency, there are instances where they may need to pass
IELTS and it's actually quite difficult for a native speaker to pass IELTS if they don't know
what to expect on the test because it doesn't measure English in the way necessarily that we
actually use it in day-to-day life. For example, grammatical range. No native speaker is thinking
about using a range of different grammar and different words and synonyms and things like
that when they are speaking. We actually tend to be quite repetitive. Tense, for instance,
present simple, past simple accounts for about 90% of all verbs in conversation. While if you use the
same verbs again and again and again in IELTS, you're going to get a fairly low score. Anyway,
I digress. Measure actions, not proficiency. Process not progress. Although measuring the
process will automatically help you to understand your progress.
This is me, Julian Northbrook signing out from another video. Head over to doingenglish.com and
sign up for my free daily English mastery email tips. One hell of a mouthful to say
that. All you've got to do is to stick your email address in the box provided,
and you will get exciting tantalizing emails from me every day all about
mastering the English language. If you're interested in my MEFA course,
that's also the best thing to do is to sign up for my daily emails first because that's the process,
the way that it works. Anyway, this is me, Julian signing out from another video. Bye-bye.