4 STEPS TO EFFECTIVE GOAL-SETTING
By: Nisha Beam
Tags: Learning, Language Learning, Goal Setting, Foreign Language, Goals

Pic courtesy: Issac Smith on Unsplash

The language learning journey is not a linear progression. We meander, go around in circles, make twists and turns quite a lot before arriving at our goal. And getting lost is an inevitable part of the journey. Defining a language goal helps reduce the getting-lost time, though it does not eliminate it.

The precise the goal is, the better it is to track, measure, and achieve.

There are several goal setting tips available all over the internet. My personal favorite is a simple one. It is something that I learned to do when I was a project manager in a different life, eons ago.

Your language learning goal is your project. You religiously track it to the finish line.

Goal setting steps

Step 1: Identify your project scope

How do you identify your project scope or learning goal? You could do one of the two — not put too much thought into it and go for the next topic in your textbook or see what aspect of the language you are falling behind. Or you may want to practice or revise more to reach a comfortable usage level. In either case, define it specifically: what you will include in it and what you will not.

So, your goal could be 50 new words in Korean, listen to one Russian podcast and take notes, learn preterito indefinido in Spanish, watch one French film, prepare for the B2 exam.

Step 2: Gather your learning materials

If you are like me, you’d have bought tons of materials, downloaded tons of free materials from the internet, saved to your playlists a lot of grammar videos, and be basically drowning in your materials. However, pick one or two materials that reflect your learning needs.

Pick the 50 words you want to learn, download the movie, download Youtube videos that teach preterito indefinido, identify the podcast, and get your notebook and pen or whatever you use to take notes.

Step 3: Break the goal into sub-goals

Now, break your goal into manageable chunks. I’d look at the amount of time I have in a day/week to allocate toward my language learning. If I have, say, 3 hours, I’d break it into 20-minute chunks during the weekday and the rest over the weekend.

If your goal is learning all the B2 materials to get ready for your exam, each sub-goal can be further divided into smaller goals, and they can have sub-sub-goals.

Your learning goals are not to flex; well, you can flex. After all, you’ve put in so much time and effort to do an activity that would baffle non-language-learners. Jokes aside, they are not for competing with your language learning idols on the internet. They are not for beating yourself down or stressing yourself out. They are for progressing toward your ultimate language goal, and you are setting goals that are realistic in nature to achieve it.

Step 4: Determine when you will be able to study and allocate time.

Time is our currency. After our family, work, and other commitments, what is left is all we have for rest, relaxation, and rejuvenation. Essentially, we are taking time from our downtime to commit to language learning. Commit what you can. You can do only ten mins a day? No problema. Two hours a week? No problema. Remember not to leave too much gap in your learning frequency. The more gap you give, the more difficult it becomes to take off from where you left.

For each sub-goal, commit a time. Remember that life happens. So, add some buffer time to each of your sub-goal. You may also include extra days to compensate for the days that you don’t feel like learning.

Step 5: Add an extra sub-goal called ‘Revision.’

Revising what you learned helps to concretize the concepts in your long-term memory. Periodic revision is important. For example, you have studied for 3 days, spend one day revising what you learned. Then, once you have completed 3 more days of studying, go back and revise everything that you’ve learned in the past 6 days. Until you know the concepts, pat-down, revise, revise, and revise some more.

Final thoughts:

If you set precise, measurable, attainable goals, it becomes easy to track. Something measurable or trackable, like 50 new words or writing a journal entry of 150 words in your target language, will give you an achievable goal that will be satisfying when you put a tick mark in front of it than say, a goal to ‘achieve native-like proficiency.’

Adding up the time allocated to the sub-goals will give you an idea of how long it will take to achieve your goal. This helps plan your future goals because you know for sure that learning 50 new words takes x number of days, studying x minutes per day.

If you are working under a deadline, define the deadline first. This way, you know how much time you have and can allocate time to the sub-goals accordingly.

A goal such as ‘achieve B2 proficiency’ will work if your sub-goals are specific and you have allocated time to take the B2 exam to call it achieved.

On a totally different note, if I’m preparing for an exam like B2, I’d rather work with a language tutor who specializes in exam taking. They’ll give you the tips and tricks to save time, learn concepts differently, manage your time while taking the tests, and of course, they know for sure what your level of learning, effort, and proficiency to match what is required. Just a small tip like read the questions before you read your reading comprehension passage will save so much of your time and make your efficiency go up.

And remember, if you can’t stick to your plan, it could mean that you overestimated the free time you have or underestimated your attention span. So, revise the plan. There’s no shame in this language learning game!

Congratulations! You have successfully set up a goal that works for you. Now you are good to track and tick the sub-goals off your list as you complete them.