Small goals for language learning

Do you sometimes feel like you are not making progress with your English? Does this cause you to lose your motivation? I know a lot of learners do feel this way. Here’s a suggestion for you.

Try setting yourself some small and easy to achieve goals for your language learning. Keep reading for some examples.

• Listen to one song in English every day for a week.
• Spend fifteen minutes a day reading in English.
• Choose one grammar point that you’ve always had difficulty with. Study and practise it this week.
• Watch a film in English every Saturday for a month.
• Each day, fInd 5 or 10 useful words you’d like to remember and learn them.
• Read one newspaper article every day.
• Watch a YouTube video in English every day.

Small goals like this will help you to have a clearer focus for your learning and it will boost your motivation. It might also help you to feel you are progressing again.

Small goals should be SMART goals, which you may have heard of. SMART goals are:
Specific
“I want to write better English” is general. “I want to know how to write a formal email” is specific.
Measurable
“I want to learn ten new words a day” is easier to measure than “I want to improve my vocabulary”.
Achievable
Be realistic about what you can do and don’t be overly ambitious. You can’t learn 100 words a day. It’s too difficult. Ten words is more manageable.
Relevant
Watching films is fun and it’s great for listening skills and vocabulary but it won’t help you learn how to write a business letter. Make your studies relevant to your goals.
Time-bound
Decide to do something for 15 or 30 minutes a day or every day for a week, for example.)

For more suggestions and useful links to helpful resources, you might find these posts on reading and listening useful.

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