I’m stuck on the intermediate level. Is this my fault?

You're long past the stage of having just enough English to get by during a trip. Now you can maintain conversations and express your ideas. You can understand most of what you read and even watch your favourite TV series without subtitles.

However, you don't seem to be able to go beyond this stage:

• you want to understand everything you read;
• you want to talk to native speakers without asking them to repeat themselves;
• you want to express yourself in English as clearly and precisely as you do in your own mother language.

But nothing you're doing seems to bring the result you expect. You even start to wonder if your dream is achievable. I can almost hear you scream, "Help! Is there anything I can do?"

First of all, there are some things you have to understand about being stuck on the intermediate level:

You're not the only one, and it happens to learners of all languages

This is a well-known phenomenon in language learning, did you know that? When students reach the intermediate level, they hit a plateau and feel that, despite all their efforts, they've stopped learning. But is that what’s really going on? Have you really stopped learning?

What happens when you get to the intermediate level

When you're beginning to learn English, you know you've got a long way to go, but you don't know exactly how long. You know there's a lot of work to be done before you become fluent, but you can't even work out how much there is for you to learn.

When you get to the intermediate level, on the other hand, you know so much English that you realize exactly how much there is still left to learn. You “know what you don't know”:

• You know exactly how tricky prepositions are. They're much trickier than you could ever have foreseen!
• You know all the rules for the present perfect, and you’re still not confident using it.
• You know a great number of phrasal verbs, but at the same time, you also know there's a huge number you haven't mastered yet.
• You watch Friends with no subtitles any time. However, when you tune in to CNN, you get confused by the variety of accents and the speed of the journalists’ speech, and get completely lost when the topic of discussion is unfamiliar to you. And you know just how much you still have to develop your listening skills and expand your vocabulary.
• You can talk for hours to your (non-native) friends about your job, favourite films, your last holiday, and even some complex subjects. But you struggle to have a spontaneous conversation with native (or proficient) English speakers and find socializing in English harder than giving a presentation.

In summary, you're now more aware of what mastering a language involves and can measure how much you still have to accomplish to reach your goals.

You've also become more aware of your own English skills. You’re better at noticing your own mistakes. Because of that, you might feel that instead of moving forwards, your English is going backwards. But the fact that you can now spot mistakes you couldn't see before is actually a good sign. You're not necessarily making more mistakes than before. You simply hadn't noticed them until now. And if you're trying to use more sophisticated language (which you should be), you're bound to make mistakes before you master this new language.

Sometimes you feel you've stopped learning, but this may not be true.

Most learners expect their progress to be linear, which means they expect their development to be like this:

But in fact, the normal progress of someone who is learning a language is like this:

For the non-mathematical brains: People expect to continue learning at the same speed in all stages of their development. They think like this: “If I dedicate one hour a day to study English now I'm an intermediate learner, I'll learn as much as I did when I was a pre-intermediate student, studying one hour a day.”

But in fact, when you get to the intermediate level, you won't feel you're learning as much as you did at the beginning, even if you dedicate the same amount of time to your studies.

Now, look at this picture. If achieving proficiency was like reaching a mountain peak, when you started learning English, you thought, "It took me four months to climb a third of this mountain so, if I keep making the same effort, in eight months I'll reach the peak."

However, halfway through your journey, instead of continually moving upwards, you started moving almost horizontally. You keep moving, but you don't make much progress.

And then you realise that there's a plateau on your way to proficiency, and not a smooth and steady climb towards the mountain peak.

To be able to move past this plateau and keep climbing the mountain, some things will have to change. What you've been doing isn't effective anymore. The strategies you've been following and the tools you've been using have become inefficient (see more on my posts Why songs aren't good for your English and Why films aren't good for your English). To move past the intermediate plateau, you'll have to change your approach to learning English.

What you have to do to move past the plateau

From now on, you'll have to face learning English from a different perspective. You'll have to employ more deliberate efforts to get off the intermediate plateau. You'll have to change:

• your strategy;
• your tools;
• your mindset.

In my next post, I'll answer the following question: Can I move past the intermediate level? I'll go deeper into the strategies and tools that are effective at this level, and tell you what I've learned from my own experience and that of my students’.