✨Tracking Your Progress in English. Key Milestones to Watch✨

Learning a language is a journey, and progress doesn’t always feel linear. Last week, I held mid-term one-to-one meetings with my students to assess their movement and how they feel about it. Sometimes, students themselves are not clear on how to determine progress. So I’d like to share these milestones with a wider audience:

✅ A richer vocabulary—phrases you understand (receptive) and phrases you actively use (productive). I always keep a record of all the phrases my students come across in our course in a Google spreadsheet to ensure those phrases aren’t lost or forgotten. This helps with vocabulary revision and allows students to see how many words they’ve learned that were previously unfamiliar.

✅ A wider range of grammar structures, making your speech and writing more dynamic. So, if at the beginning of the course students only knew the present simple, past simple, and future simple, but now they’ve also mastered the present continuous, perfect, perfect continuous, and various ways to express the future— that’s definitely progress!

✅ Fewer mistakes in the areas they’ve already studied—proof that learning is sticking! And the key phrase here is "in the areas they’ve studied." Mistakes are inevitable when stepping beyond familiar territory into areas that haven’t been covered yet. So if you feel like you’re still making mistakes, pause before assuming there’s no progress. Those errors might simply be a sign that you’re exploring new ground—not that you’re stuck.

✅ The ability to speak for longer periods without stopping, with fewer pauses and hesitations.

✅ More confidence and, most importantly, more enjoyment in conversations.

✅ Improved comprehension—whether it’s understanding fast speech, accents, or complex texts.

Progress isn’t just about perfection; it’s about feeling more comfortable and capable over time. Keep pushing forward, and celebrate every small win!

How do you track your progress in English (or any language you’re learning)? Let’s share insights! 👇

#usefultip