HITTING PLATEAUS

There are, in fact, two sorts of plateaus. The former is a well-known

phenomenon when your progress is no longer visible or tangible, while
the latter is not so easy to pinpoint, it has to deal with teacher-student
relations, when teacher and student exhaust their potential of beneficial
collaboration. Let’s assign symbolic names to both of them.

PLATEAU # 1 INTERNAL PLATEAU

It just so happens that once you (the student) achieve a certain level of
fluency and accuracy (B1+), it is harder and harder to trace any progress
at all - you seem to be going nowhere fast. Why does this occur? The
thing is you are making little steps forward, it’s just not as dramatic as it
used to be, because when you already feel comfortable using the foreign
language and are able to incorporate it into your work / life, performing
practical tasks (productive skills) and understanding spoken language
(receptive skills), then anything that goes beyond that is a kind of
SURPLUS - really hard to gauge. It’s like attaining a particular level of
income when your life all of a sudden becomes financially comfortable
and you don’t have to count the pennies any more. After reaching that
milestone, the odds of any pay rises catapulting you to cloud nine are
infinitesimal. Therefore, if you feel that there has been no noticeable
improvement in weeks / months, it might be time to take a break and
switch your attention to something else. Boosting memory and
enhancing creativity with the help of various hobbies / sports or simply
giving your brain a pause are some of the great ways to move on to the
next level in language learning. Though this tip may sound bizarre
coming from an EFL teacher, I still insist that you should take a holistic
attitude to language acquisition. Proper sleep, well-balanced nutrition,
sufficient physical activity, as well as your IQ, age, attention span, family
status, self-esteem, personality, mental and physical health and overall
level of happiness each play a role in your individual foreign language
acquisition pace and patterns. Sometimes it’s enough to take a breather,
to distance yourself from studying, after which you can get back to
learning with replenished energy.
 PLATEAU # 2 EXTERNAL PLATEAU

At some point during the tutoring, even if the student and the teacher are
compatible and generate promising outcomes in terms of progress in the
beginning, they are doomed to reach a stage in their cooperation when
the student's progress dwindles for some time and then comes up
against a dead end. Why on earth does it have to be like that? The
answer is that we are literally wired that way. At first, it feels like hitting
the jackpot, you go from strength to strength almost effortlessly, picking
up new words, and what used to sound like Greek to you turns into
something easy to make out. Nevertheless, somewhere along the path
our initial enthusiasm wears off, the novelty and the accompanying
excitement vanish into thin air. We end up snug in our comfort zones,
calmly procrastinating when it comes to home assignment. And here’s
when progress screeches to a halt. Sad as it might sound, even though
your teacher could be uniquely gifted, he or she is not a magician – after
a while (a year, 2 years or more) they eventually run out of tricks up their
sleeve to motivate you and contribute to your language acquisition.

HYBRID PLATEAU (INTERNAL-EXTERNAL PLATEAU)

Sometimes you can hit both plateaus simultaneously, one stemming

from the other. It’s definitely a case when you should terminate
collaboration, take it easy for a while or drastically change your learning
habits. For instance, you could shift your focus towards writing more,
since writing is the most underestimated and overlooked skill. Your best
bet in this case is to take charge of your own language acquisition under
the watchful guidance of your favorite tutor.

SOLVING THE UNSOLVABLE

No matter what plateau you’ve hit, it remains a plateau. Here are some
ideas on how to tackle this brain fog.

The approximate action plan is as follows.

1) take a month’s (or longer) break

2) change the tutor / language agency / study buddy
3) change the format of learning (group classes >>> one-to-one
classes and vice versa; online >>> offline and vice versa)
4) change the focus of your studies (if you studied General English,
move on to Business English or IELTS preparation, etc). Raising
the bar in the form of setting challenges like IELTS or TOEFL is
one of the surest ways to get back on track.
5) change the tools and methods – different textbooks, series, talk
shows, programmes, news websites, online magazines, fiction
books, etc. Variety is a key element: all resources, even if they are
still chock-full of new vocabulary coupled with grammar, at some
point exhaust their capacity of contributing to your language
acquisition.
6) acquire new learning habits: if you previously studied in the
mornings, rethink this policy and devote your evenings to learning
the foreign language; alternatively, if you studied on weekdays,
consider taking classes at the weekends.
7) incorporate the target language into your daily life: keep a diary in
English (if that’s your chosen foreign language); volunteer to
communicate in English at work (prepare presentations, write
emails, take phone calls, chair meetings, etc)